concept in development
web/TV series
James Ricketson
NOTE: “Zoomers” will be shot on smartphones, in such a way that the eight central characters (the actors who play them), along with skeleton crews, never have to be in the same room at the same time, thus adhering to government edict in relation to ‘social distancing’ and ensuring that there is zero possibility of any member of the cast or crew transmitting Coronavirus to each other.
Eight young Gen Z (Zoomer) men and women (18 – 30) , confined to their bedrooms during a pandemic, seek refuge in each other’s company, online. They become friends, ‘frenemies’, quarrel, argue, debate, fall in and out of love, seek meaning and solace in their new lives, as they use the Zoom to create a mutually supportive ‘cyber-tribe’. When one dies under mysterious circumstances, others in the ‘tribe’ are implicated in the death of their friend. With a second Zoomer death, the plot thickens!
Cammie, 19 years old, has an idea for an online ‘Reality Web’ show.
She needs to find just the right combination of 18 – 30 year old Gen Z women and men to ‘star’ in it, without their realizing that they have been carefully selected as participants.
Is Cammie who she appears to be – a single-child school girl in her final year of home-schooling during a pandemic, whose mother is a doctor working in a hospital with infected victims? Or is she a whip-smart manipulative con artist who plays at being a blonde bimbo, ‘little girl lost’ and a variety of other roles when it suits her? A narcissistic sociopath, perhaps?
The unwitting ‘cast’ Cammie assembles come from diverse ethnic, cultural, gender and socio-economic backgrounds. They have all been forced into isolation by a pandemic sweeping the world, which Cammie refers to as ‘the thing’; a pandemic that leaves them with no choice but to conduct their social (and sexual) lives online.
What the Zoomers have in common is that they have all recently been confronted by harsh realities of life that have hitherto eluded them. They all know someone they love, someone they have made love with, a friend, who has contracted ‘the thing’; someone who has died. They are all worried, scared and/or terrified of what the future holds for them. Is there any future for them if no vaccine for the virus is found? They must all deal, for the first time in their young lives, with the existential questions arising from the possibility that they too could die in the cruel indiscriminate ‘death lottery’ that they have no choice but to have been given tickets in. How resilient are they in the face of hardship? How resilient must they become to survive emotionally and psychologically as weeks of isolation extend into months, with no end in sight?
Cammie’s initial ‘cast’ of Zoomers become friends, ‘frenemies’, quarrel, argue, debate, fall in and out of love, seek meaning and solace in their new lives, as they use Zoom, online, to create a mutually supportive ‘cyber-tribe’. Their attempts to do so are sometimes successful, sometimes not, often humorous but always emotionally intense as they deal with their generation’s version of the Millennial’s 9/11 Ground Zero.
Cammie, Sandy, Li Na, Gabriel (all of whom we meet in Episode One), along with four others, (a diverse, multi-cultural group) each ‘imprisoned’ in their bedroom, chat intimately, animatedly (and with generous doses of black humour) about ‘meaning of life’ questions which, as lucky beneficiaries of 21st C safety-netted Australian consumerism, they have largely avoided - living as they have been able to, carefree, responsibility-free pleasure-driven lives in which ‘likes’ on social media, Tik Tok, playing Fortnite and the posting of ‘selfies’ were highlights. They have no choice now but to question their priorities; to question everything in their lives that they have taken for granted.
In theory the Zoomers is a self selecting online club, in which new members must be voted in by a majority of the other members and can be voted out by the same majority; not unlike a Reality TV show. (In reality Cammie is pulling lots of strings; is the puppeteer). This is not the only similarity with Reality TV, as will become apparent as we discover, as the story unfolds, the role that Cammie has played in bringing this unlikely group of young people together. Cammie’s name is actually Olivia. Cammie is short for ‘chameleon’, the nickname her father gave her as a child, living in her own dream-world, when she revealed a talent for story-telling, impersonation and playing fast and loose with the truth very convincingly. So convincingly that she could fool even her father. She has been true to her chameleon persona ever since. Cammie is not what she seems at all, as her fellow Zoomers (and the audience) will discover.
The online heart-to-heart conversations between the Zoomers become increasingly intimate as the story progresses. They reveal aspects of themselves they have never shared with anyone before; discuss at a very deep level subjects that they had never raised with themselves (let alone others) in their cossetted bubble-wrapped pre-pandemic lives. They connect with each other at a very deep level. (Think “Breakfast Club” in cyberspace.)
The Zoomers revel in these new online connections, enjoy being part of an alternative ‘family’ or ‘tribe’, until they discover that one of them (Cammie is the prime suspect) is recording all their conversations and sharing them outside of the group (with friends who share with their friends, who share with their friends and so on), despite the agreement they all entered into that what transpired between them was private: “What happens online stays between us, right? Not to be shared.” (Is such a dream of privacy even possible in the digital world the Zoomers live in? They are about to find out the hard way.)
This breach of the Zoomer’s agreed upon privacy rules comes to a head when edited versions of their Zoom interactions start to appear online under the banner: ‘Zoomers Uncut’. It is not just the privacy breaches that concern the eight ‘Zoomers’, but the way in which their intimate online Zoom interactions have been edited together to change the context (and hence the meaning) of what has actually transpired between them. Just who is in control of the ‘Zoomers Uncut’ web series (again, Cammie is the prime suspect) becomes increasingly important as the ‘series’ goes viral and it becomes clear that whoever controls ‘Zoomers Uncut’ is now making a lot of money through paid advertising. Their attempts to have ‘Zoomers Uncut’ removed from the internet only serve to make it even more of a ‘must-see’ web series.
Whoever is in control of ‘Zoomers Uncut’ has not only appropriated all of the interactions between the eight, but has hacked into their computers and vacuumed up all information about them stored there and in the Cloud – their private diaries, family photos, personal emails, shared sexts, sex videos, visits to porn sites, encounters with police… everything. This has a huge (and damaging) impact on the lives of them all.
‘Zoomers Uncut’ seems (and the operative word is ‘seems’) to be in sync with Cammie’s original secret plan (now not so secret) to create an online web ‘Reality TV’ series that would, as she confided in one (and only one) Zoomer, “Go viral”. But is she responsible for ‘Zoomers Uncut’? Or is it one of the other Zoomers? Or a random hacker from anywhere in the world who has stumbled upon the ‘Zoomers’ and saw a way to exploit their shared intimacies?
All these questions come to the fore when, close to the end of Episode One, it seems that Cammie has died – by her own hand, in an accident, or murdered. Whichever it might be, there is evidence (as the story unfolds, moving back and forth in time) that any one of the other seven Zoomers, whose reputations have been trashed in the ‘Zoomers Uncut’ broadcasts had good reason (and the opportunity) to kill her, when they realized that her agenda in bringing them all together was not as they had been led to believe it was.
Nothing in ‘Zoomers’ is quite what it seems to be, however. (Think “Twin Peaks”). Multiple plot twists and turns will keep the audience uncertain, from episode to episode, as to what is real and what has been staged by Cammie including, perhaps, her own ‘death’. Is the body we see in Episode One actually Cammie’s? All the circumstantial evidence suggests that it is but might she have ‘faked’ it? If so, why? Or is the body real, but not Cammie’s? And who is monitoring all that takes place in Cammie’s bedroom through a tiny CCTV camera installed in the ceiling? And why?
Cammie’s dream at the outset, we learn as the story unfolds, is to create a web series unlike anything broadcast online before; a series that challenges the conventional wisdom of what can (and can’t) be broadcast, in content, form and style. “No rules,” she declares more than once. She wants to sail as close to the wind as she can, in terms of censorship, in exploring the sexual desires, frustrations and practices of her generation as they grapple with forming intimate relationships without physical contact.
Are Cammie’s motives in any way noble, as she presents them to her fellow Zoomers? Or does she simply want to capture the eyeballs, the attention, of millions of online viewers? If so, why? For her own ego gratification? Or does she simply want to make a lot of money when her show, ‘Zoomers’ (or ‘Zoomers Uncut’) goes viral? “If you are going to dream, dream big,” says Cammie, offering a clue but leaving open the question of what her dream is. Is ‘Zoomers Uncut’ a manifestation of Cammie’s ‘dreaming big’?
Underlying the murder-mystery and thriller plot element of ‘Zoomers’ (with no apologies for the mixing and melding of genres) the series is intended to be challenging, thought-provoking, provocative and to both give members of Generation Z a voice and a form of entertainment that speaks to the world they live in.
Denied the chance to kiss, to cuddle, to touch, to be in the same room with each other, the Zoomers have no choice but to conduct their relationships totally online. They learn that whilst online romance is difficult (to say the least!), and while cyber sex may be safe, it is no substitute for the joys of kissing, cuddling a warm partner; for making love. (Trying to replicate physical intimacy in the privacy of their bedrooms gives rise to a good deal of humour and, as one Zoomer discovers when his mother walks in during an R-rated cyber sex session, being able to lock your door from the inside becomes an issue for young men and women who crave privacy.)
The world these young Zoomers have grown up in no longer exists. It was a world in which there were few constraints (financial or cultural) on what they were allowed to do. Parents and grandparents, more concerned with protecting them from harm (physical and emotional), nurturing their self-esteem, with being ‘friends’ to their kids and grandkids and making them ‘happy’, have not equipped these young adults with the resilience they need to deal with hardship, uncertainty and the possibility that they could catch ‘the thing’. Their obsession with individual ‘rights’ is challenged in a way that it has never been before as they have no choice but to live without so much they have taken for granted and learn to live within boundaries imposed by government edict.
The culture that has nurtured them into young adulthood, obsessed with consumerism, celebrity worship and questions of gender and identity, (to name but a few influences) has taught them next to nothing about how to identify themselves as members of the planetary tribe that is the human race.
The Zoomers, also known as members of ‘Generation Snowflake’, must learn fast how not to melt as the world they have grown up in, that is so familiar to them, that they have taken for granted, crashes and burns around them.
As with the kids stranded on an island in “Lord of the Flies” the Zoomers, stranded in cyberspace on ‘Zoomer Island’ (as one member describes it) are faced with the challenge of re-inventing an online tribe that fulfils their emotional needs in a way that the discredited fraying mainstream culture of which they are a part cannot; a tribe that inculcates its members with the new set of values and priorities that see the health and continuity of the tribe as more important than the rights of each individual member. All this in theory, of course. In practice it’s a different matter!
As the world grinds to a halt the Zoomers are on a sharp learning curve; their emotional, social and economic survival depending, more than ever before in their lives, on focusing less on their individual rights and questions of identity, than on caring and sharing with other members of their ‘Zoomer tribe’ and the larger Australian and world ‘tribes’ that they must now acknowledge they belong to. As their relationships with each other deepen and become more complex, this is how they come to see themselves – as members of a tribe that is not all that different from tribes in ancient times, other than the size of the tribe.
Just as their ancestors, in pre-historic times, sat around actual fires, (warm, with flickering flames and hot coals) these young Zoomers sit with their warm laptops, their iPads and smart phones in their bedrooms, dealing with existential angst as they confront an unknown (and unknowable) future, and the very real possibility that one or more of them may not survive the pandemic.
On one level, ‘Zoomers’ is an investigation into a murder (a possible murder!), seeking evidence to identify the perpetrator and explore his or her reasons for killing Cammie.
On another level ‘Zoomers’ is a cultural-anthropological investigation into how a representative sample of one particular generation (Zoomers) dealt with, responded to, a worldwide pandemic that radically, and very suddenly, led to a radical transformation of the kind that no-one alive on the planet had ever experienced before.
Fast-moving, entertaining, challenging, confronting, outrageous, dangerous and often frivolous drama though ‘Zoomers’ will be (think “Twin Peaks”), beneath the surface there is a seriousness of intent. These kids, a microcosm of their generation, are asking the same questions, facing the same challenges we all face as we look to an uncertain future. The questions they ask are not that different from the questions all cultures have asked of themselves since time immemorial, and neither are the answers.
Central to further development of ‘Zoomers’ is putting together a team of young screenwriters who love this germinal concept and who understand Generation Z and the world they inhabit in a way that an ageing Baby Boomer such as myself does not.
James Ricketson April 2020
No comments:
Post a Comment