A Mystery

I’m not going to mention names or companies or shows because there’s no point, but I do want to discuss what happened because it opens a window to the pass but instead of letting light in it only reveals fog.

Long, long time ago an agent sent a writer to me to pitch for the show I was working on.  The writer seemed a bit quiet and withdrawn but not excessively so.  They pitched an idea that offered potential for the series so I took them to lunch to discuss the story further.

The writer didn’t reveal much about themselves and I didn’t pry.  They did respond well to the necessary give and take in developing an idea for a TV script so I gave them the assignment and sent them off.

In due time they came back with an acceptable first draft.  I can’t recall if I passed my notes along to them to fix or if I just polished it myself but I do recall it came close enough to what we needed that I asked them to come up with more ideas and passed their name along to other staff members working on other shows as someone they might want to talk to.

Never heard from the writer again. 

Not an unusual occurrence in TV writing.  A good freelancer might get snatched up by another show or find a more rewarding gig doing something else.  The episode they wrote was well received by the fans so I figured I see their name pop up elsewhere.

It didn’t.

Again, not that unusual.  Joseph Heller wrote an episode of McHale’s Navy before Catch-22 broke big, so if I saw their credit on books or short stories or magazine articles I wouldn’t have been surprised.

Nada.

Every now and then I’d check to see if they every published or got credit for anything else.  Nothing.  It seemed as if they vanished off the face of the earth,

The show they pitched and sold to ended that season, but before the final word came down one of the other writers on staff had been developing a story arc for another season based on what happened in the show up to that point.

I never put pen to paper regarding this following season idea but I discussed it frequently with him and knew the broad strokes of his concept.  He wrote it up and submitted it to the studio but they turned it down.

And that, we thought, was that.

Jump ahead a couple of decades.  The show possessed a pretty strong afterlife in derivative media, including comic books.  At one time or another several different companies did comic books based on the show.

As is my practice, I steered clear of these comics.  For my own sanity I’ve found it best that when I leave a project that I put it down and walk away from it.  Looking at what others are doing would serve no useful purpose; I had my turn, now it’s somebody else’s chance to play with the toys.

I am willing to talk about what I did on the show when I was working on it, and recently I was asked to participate in a discussion about the proposed next season that never got off the ground.

Someone mentioned something very similar to the idea developed by the other staff writer had been done by one of the comic book series.

The author of said comic book?  The freelancer who sold a story to me.

Curious, I looked up details on this comic book series.  The freelancer’s run was only a few issues; while I found out they died a decade or so back, I could locate no other biographical data on them.

Now, here’s the mystery:  Where did they get the idea for the comic book they wrote?

Let’s say you’re asked to write a continuation of a TV show that picks up where the previous season left off.

You’ll probably think of a few obvious ideas you could do, any one of which would preclude the others if chose.

Call ‘em A, B, and C.

Say you pick A.  From that you’ll have certain obvious follow up sub-ideas -- 1, 2, 3 -- that could be developed, but again, any sub-idea you pick precludes the other sub-ideas.

So now you have A1.  From there, another level of sub-ideas -- a, b, c.  Pick one.

Put a bunch of writers on the same project, and some will come up with A, some with B, some with C.

Keep the writers who chose A.  From that group you’ll get writers developing A1, A2, and A3.

Winnow it down further to the A1 idea thread.  What are the chances of all the remaining writers picking A1a as their final option?

A long shot…

…but not impossible.

From what I can tell, the freelancer I dealt with came up with the same A1a that the staff writer I worked with developed.

I can’t be certain at this date, but I wouldn’t be surprised if rough drafts of the staff writer’s proposal weren’t floating around the office at the time.

The freelancer did a fine job -- certainly one of the more unusual episodes we did -- but then seemed to vanish without a trace.

They popped back to pitch and sell their mini-series to the comic book company published the property at the time, then vanished again.

How did they develop the comic book idea?

Simply a case of logically following A to A1 to A1a by chance? 

Or did they see / hear / obtain the development for the unproduced season while pitching their script to me?

And if they weren’t plugged into the comics / fandom ecosystem, how did they become aware of the publisher doing the comic so they could pitch the mini-series to them?

I don’t know, and because I can’t say with authority, I’m leaving the names blank so as not to impugn the memory of someone who may just have had a really odd career.

In the purported words of the king of Siam, “Is a puzzlement!”

© Buzz Dixon