Television Addiction Part 3: Oh, the TV shows I Would Love to See Get Made

            (This is a continuation from the last post.  Go to the end of that post to see the justification for this one.)

            Now that Game of Thrones has proven complex fake history can be a ratings winner, here are some complex events from real history I would love to see turned into historical drama TV shows.

1.  War of the Roses –This one’s a no-brainer.  If we can do Game of Thrones, why not do War of the Roses?

2. Henry II and sons—This would be a great drama about the quarrels within a powerful family

3. End of the Roman Republic—  I know we just had the series Rome a few years ago, but I think it can be done better.  Rome just made a caricature out of a lot of the politics of the period, but I think it would be interesting to do a TV show that tried to get more in-depth.  Personally, I think Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome  series offers a great blueprint of how this can be done.  Someone should just adapt her series into a television show.

4.  French Revolution—Not every Revolution would lend itself to television, but I think the French Revolution would.  Although the Revolution went through various phases, I think during each of these phases the action was centralized in Paris, and although the people in power changed rapidly, at any given moment there were only a small group of people in control, often meeting in small rooms. 

5.  The Paris Commune  This one would be a little bit more tricky to pull off, because there wasn’t as much clear leadership and it might be harder to make a coherent plot around the events.  But I still think it could be done.

6.  The English Civil War—I always thought The Tudors was a bit of a waste.  Why focus on telling the stories of Kings when you can focus on democratic movements instead?  In reading about the Levellers I thought there was more than enough material here to get a TV show out of.  I would focus heavily on the Leveller movement, but include broader events in the English Civil War as a backdrop.

7. Gordon at Khartoum  You probably couldn’t get a full 6 seasons and a movie out of this story, but focusing on the developing crisis in Egypt and the Sudan, and then Gordon at Khartoum and the resulting political fallout for Gladstone, and then the avenging missions carried out by Wolseley, you could easily get maybe 1 or 2 seasons out of this story.  Just focus on the story laid out in Three Empires on the Nile  or The Scramble for Africa.  (The entire story of the Scramble for Africa is too big for a TV show, but it is possible to focus on this event as representative of a lot of the same issues going on elsewhere on the African continent during this time period.)

8. The King David Story –Actually what I’d really like to see is a television series that puts the whole Bible on TV (or the narrative parts of the Bible anyway.)  This may seem strange for me as an agnostic to dream about putting the Bible on TV, but actually I believe that if people actually knew what was in the Bible stories, it would create much more agnostics.  I know some Christians would argue the opposite, that knowing more about the Bible would actually bring people to faith.  So let’s run the experiment then.  We’d just film the Bible stories as they were written.  We wouldn’t make anything more bloody than it actually is, but we wouldn’t censor anything either.  Just a straight up adaptation of the Bible.  Christians would love it, and agnostics and atheists would also love it, so we would have a built in audience already.  And we would see what the reaction of the general public would be.

            Of course you could never show most of those Bible stories on network TV, so it would have to be on HBO or something, but let’s try it nonetheless.

            However, if I had to pick just one story, it would be the King David story.  Especially since I thought Kings did such a terrible job of adapting this story, I think it deserves another chance.

            Part of the problem with Kings is that they started too late.  Kings started with Saul and Samuel already past their prime, but to really get the whole narrative sweep of the story, you need to see not just Saul’s fall, but his rise as well (that makes him all the more of a tragic figure, and more interesting).  I would start from the very beginning of 1st Samuel, because Samuel’s story is important as well.

            Some of the stories would need a little bit of fine tuning to get rid of the various contradictions (the contradictions between Samuel 16 and 17, for example—or you could just leave the contradictions in and let people make their own decisions.) 

             I’d try and include everything and leave out as little as possible, and I think it would make great TV.

            And here’s another idea—because the numbers given for the reign of various Judges don’t add up with the total, some fundamentalists have tried to get around this by suggesting that some of the last few chapters in Judges overlapped with the time of Samuel and Eli [LINK HERE].  So if we started from the beginning of Samuel’s time, it might also be possible to justify shoe-horning the last few stories of Judges into the same narrative.  The story of Samson, for example, would make great TV (you could have young Samuel as an observer, to some of these events.)  And the last few chapters of Judges, 19-21, would also show how Israelite society was spinning out of control, and might provide some of the background needed to explain the transition to monarchy.  Plus, the stories of rape, and atrocities and civil war—the HBO audiences would just eat that stuff up!  This stuff was made for cable TV.

            Those are all my ideas at the moment.  If anyone has any more ideas for historical events you think would make great TV shows, leave them in the comments section.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky- What's the WTO?