Billy Shakespeare said, "All the world is a stage and we are merely players, fucking shit up."
Or something like that. This show's main character is obsessed with being his stage's playright, bending his reality in wildly amusing ways, creating excitement and drama with all the players in his life.
Events are loosely based on true stories of yours truly.
I'm calling him Frank McFeral. Each episode opens with Frank as an ancient, 100 plus year old man on his deathbed, surrounded by the ghosts of people who played rolls in his wild and risky life.
Driven by the music, culture and events of the baby boom generation, an episode from Frank’s long and crazy life “flashes before our eyes” and his face morphs to an earlier time with one of the wild stories about his fascinating family, friends, street racing, violence, a star-crossed love affair, summer of love in Haight-Ashbury, the war in Vietnam, the 1980’s punk scene in NYC, arrests, jail time, making music with legendary musicians, his long and creative advertising career, the scandals surrounding “The King of Beers” family, finding a soul-mate and raising a rock power trio and their struggles with success, and his obsession with teasing death and bending life to it’s limits.
A 28 year old man gets involved in Ancestry.com and meets previously unknown family members. But only a few. They strike him as somewhat oddly guarded, like they are hiding something.
A friend suggests he get his DNA analyzed.
Shortly after he mails in his mucous sample, he almost gets into a terrible car accident. We get the feeling he is being watched.
When his DNA results arrive, the pie chart graphic shows many tiny multi-colored slices (like <1%) representing ancestor genes from every imaginable country and region around the world - Europe and the Middle East, Africa, Mongolia, and Native American, Antartica even some lower primate and Neanderthal. What is troubling about the results pie-chart graphic is that the largest section of his DNA make up is marked on the chart and in the cover letter as "86% OTHER.". They call it OTHER as if they don’t recognize those gene molecules. The letter says that the "86% OTHER" DNA results are of an origin that they or the genetics lab have no record of or any knowledge or experience with them.
Truth is that they have seen it before in DNA taken from Area 51 tissues discovered in UFO sightings in New Mexico and from DNA on the shroud of Turin. We get the feeling that these mysterious results are other-worldly or maybe evil or maybe super human.
The DNA Lab invites Frank to visit them, where things get weird and he is confronted with examples of OTHER DNA individuals, and he meets a forensic biologist from the Exceptional Human Research Dept at Stanford University.
Other important characters that join the quest with our hero are a Catholic Priest investigator, our hero’s bright nerdy sexy girlfriend, a man who has always claimed to be our hero’s uncle (revealed to be a Gov’t agent) and our hero’s best friend, a talented writer and film maker, who is a great asset as a thinker, researcher, idea guy. He makes his mysterious identity a quest for truth about himself and "Others" like him, who are drawn to each other and appear to have a common mission, once they are "reunited." There are moments that we suspect are evidence of possible super human talents or traits, but only sensory or clairvoyant, limited to personal intellectual genius or hightened levels perception.
Every episode exposes something new about these rare individuals and steer the viewers into a complicated string of wild possibilities.
An accomplished young psychiatrist is an absolutely dull and boring man who wants for more excitement in his life, which to all his friends and family looks very complete and well rounded. His only glimpse into a more exciting existence is through the stories he hears from one of his patients. He envisions the wild events as told by this one outrageous, insane criminal patient. He is so exhilarated by this patient's stories that he wants to hear more. Soon he decides to seek more of these kind of patients and he volunteers at mental hospitals and prisons.
One night as he is driving home from a session at a mental hospital, he stops at a convenience store. While he's waiting in line at the cash register, a crazed gunman threatens everyone and demands the money from the cash register, and from all the patrons. Our shrink flashes back to some action as described by one of his more colorful patients and he suddenly assumes the point of view and personality of his wild man patient. He acts as his patient would act in this situation - with decisive and brutal violence to overcome the gunman and save everyone in the store. He displayed heroic and decisive and successful action when it was needed and he is celebrated as the man he has never been before.
This new behavior sends a shockwave of both approval and concern through his small circle of friends and family, questioning who he is and how this could have happened. He is humbly quiet and introverted as usual and seems as befuddled by his own actions, as is everyone else.
The truth is that he is excited by his own actions as he never has been before. The plot plays out through a series of wilder and crazier patients who our hero shrink learns to emulate and assume their behaviors in ways that both help our shrink make his life more exciting, but equally make his life more complicated and drive him into deeper and deeper trouble.
Through the examples of his patients, he studies martial arts, learns to play the blues harmonica, he buys a motorcycle. And he associates with all the people and has the exciting kind of adventures that come with the subcultures that these behaviors collect. His circle becomes several circles of wildly different kinds of people. He finds himself in a new world that holds violence, death, passion and the adventure he has always wanted.
Based on his autobiography. The single most deadly gunfighter of the "Wild West" tells his own story as he is a product of his environment. He was the well-educated son of a Southern Urban Pastor. He was forced into the life of a fugitive from the Law of the Reformation South and soldiers of the Union Army. At the age of 15, his mother is assaulted and attempted robbery by a group of young former slaves. John comes to her rescue and kills one of the robbers with the knife he used to threaten John's mother. Family advisors all urged John to ride west til it all blows over. Over the next 20 years, his auto biography, in the best and most captivating frontier English vioce-over, ala Horace Greeley, recounts the many times he helped a friend or settled a score, or simply protected his freedom with his pistol that he never pulled first, but only pulled and fired in self-defense. Some history has it that John Wesley Hardin killed more than 70 men, not including Mexicans or Native Americans. Or more than 40 men when he attended prison in Florida, or was it Texas? He studied law and passed the Texas Bar Exam and practiced Law in El Paso Texas until his murder in 1895. He has many stories including shooting a man through the hotel's wall for snoring. And spending several days carousing with Abilene, Kansas Sheriff Wild Bill Hickock. He studied and earned his Juris Doctor degree while in prison and then passed the Texas Bar Exam. He practiced law in El Paso and continued to kill men in gun fights and was eventually pardoned by the State of Texas, who was running low on Texas Rangers, though Federal Marshalls still sought him out, each to his demise by John's lightning fast and deadly accurate pistol. It is said his bullet would always find his opponent in the cheek or eye. He was murdered, shot in the back, in 1895.
Or "Sons of Apathy" – about biker wanabees.
A contemporary group of 5 wealthy, directionless, idiotic young men search for a way to get more out of their spoiled, silly lives, looking for a way to be “like men?”
The characters, story and dialog are edgy, ridiculous and broad – more like “Always Sunny in Philadelphia” than the old school “Wild Hogs” movie.
Each episode opens with a montage of these idiots as they try different activities in search of something to define them as masculine. With SLAP-STICK disastrous results they try a cowboy cattle drive, skydiving, mountain climbing, scuba diving and finally, seeing an old movie on TV – “The Wild One” – they remark: “Whoa, bikers, choppers are coooool.”
They go to a local Harley-Davidson dealership and look stupid, and out of place, knocking over bikes and trying on helmets and jackets, and bad-ass t-shirts - until they meet “Hard D” a motorcycle salesman and genuine article biker (Mathew McConaughy type) who helps guide them. They take to his uber coolness and buy five big bad-ass HD road bikes. The owner's hard looking biker wife and sexually precocious teenage daughter each intrude on "Hard D" in slutty fashion and he makes comments like, "careful which boxes get your tool." Our idiot heroes gab about how cool Hard D is "banging both these bitches" and they are overheard by the dealership owner. Hard D closes the deal on the 5 bikes and the owner fires him. No commission. Our idiots follow Hard D to the bar next door where they decide to hire him to be the leader of their wannabe MC (motorcycle club.)
A lot of the charm of this comedy comes from the teacher-student relationship between Hard D and his followers as they slowly become cool dudes, and how Hard D benefits from knowing them and learning how things are done in the responsible, educated world.
Example: Hard D finds them a scary clubhouse space in a bad part of town, and the boys hire a flamboyant decorator who chooses full gay body-builder and high-end fashion decor.
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