swestrup | Reckless -- The Series.

Today in the shower I invented a hit new TV series called "Reckless". It will take a bunch of good writers, of the calibur that Columbo had, at least, to pull it off, but it would be fun. Its sort of a mixture of MIB, Columbo, Easy Rider, and Second Foundation.

The premise is simple: Every episode, our hero rides into town on his expensive harley with the overt aim of just having fun. There's nothing terribly special about the bike except that its expensive and high-end, and that it has a built-in GPS/map-display unit. The hero goes about town doing random and reckless things that spark some sort of social crisis in the town. The Hero is almost always seen as the bad guy and a bad influence, but when the smoke clears and the dust settles, he's riding (or being chased) out of town and leaving behind a reconfigured social scene that is much healthier that when he arrived. Final minutes of the show typically show him hitting a secret button on his GPS unit and using it to report a job well done, and to get the coordinates of the next place to visit.

So, the basic back-story is that there is some shadowy group, like Asimov's Second Foundation that has a world psycho-social profile its built, and they are trying to head off a looming man-made disaster that they see coming in 10 or 15 years. Being social scientists, their methods are to induce social change by sending in carefully trained agents to fix problems in key areas, with the notion that enough point changes will cause a phase change large enough to avert the disaster. The main hero is sort of like Columbo -- The facade he projects reflects has nothing to do with who he is. He plays an reckless and impulsive biker of average intelligence, when in reality he's a social engineering genius and never does anything without having considered the consequences.

Most episodes would simply explore another current or looming social problem and, while not handing out answer, will attempt to show better ways of dealing with these problems. There should also be just enough conspiracy and hidden-agenda stuff to keep the X-files people amused, especially when it turns out that this looming crisis is also part of someone's master plan...