Detective Writer TV Fever-Dream Pitch

Friday was an incredibly long night of fever-disturbed sleep, in which I would get no more than 40 minutes of consecutive rest before waking up to find a new position and adjust the covers. Not a lot to cherish there. But...

I did have a fever-fed dream of myself putting the finishing touches to a television screenplay (no doubt, inspired by the old Stephen J. Canell Productions closing logo from the 1980s series), and then I was in a studio pitch meeting trying to get tv execs to back my proposed series. The series would kick off with a cross-over episode of Castle (perhaps because on Friday I saw the newest Richard Castle hardcover novel displayed on the New Book shelf at Luther's Preus Library) and Murder, She Wrote, accompanied by an episode hosted by me featuring tv writers and producers and academics/public intellectuals, discussing the history of American detectives.

My aims were twofold: One was to bring public intellectuals into mainstream American media, and the second seemed like a desire to address the unaddressed lack of episodes of Murder, She Wrote in which Angela Lansbury's J.B. Fletcher was actually working on a novel. I cannot attest to the veracity of this claim. Nor do I have time right now for the complete DVD series to fact-check.

I guess I'm still nostalgically clinging to a past of network tv as the social, resisting for the most part this cable-facilitated Renaissance of television.