Ponderings on bringing back the "news" show

A few years ago I made a news show for games-arena.ro. It wasn't a news news show, but a "news" news show. It was inspired a bit by an old TV show called "This Saturday's News", that usually aired Friday, and didn't really contain any news. On top of that there were layers of The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and the ENN series made by Loading Ready Run for The Escapist. You can see a sample of it below, made in the middle of the "60 frames a second is actually bad for video games" craze of 2014.

The end result was a series I'm really proud of. It lasted for about 100 episodes, took more effort to make than it was worth it and forced me into new things. I was never on camera on purpose before it, I never needed to handle costumes (most of the time I wore an oversized suit jacket that made my head look tiny, and usually with a pair of ties that are probably older than me). I never really bothered with lighting before it, never had to play opposite myself in a scene either, or care about timing, because when it's just audio it's not as obvious where jump cut takes place. I enjoyed making it, coming up with new ways to take what was happening in the tech and gaming industry and turning it into a bigger farse than it was. The process was often tiring, the conditions were really guerrilla style, since I had to film around the schedule of other people, couldn't afford the time for rehearsals or alternate takes, and halfway through I realized that the image was horrible, but my old TN monitor was fudging the colors so they looked OK-ish. 

I stopped making it because I was tired, and I really couldn't do more with it. It was stagnating, it was stuck in a rut and I couldn't come up with better material.  In the three years that have gone by, it seems like all the strange and disturbing characters I came up with for the news somehow escaped and infected reality. Like someone saw a comedy character on the show and thought that would be an actual good idea. I won't be taking responsibility for it, since I doubt people in the USA would see a Romanian internet "news" show and use it as a plan to make the world a worse place. Instead, I'd say I predicted the future. But that does bring up an interesting challenge, how do you ridicule people that are so far past ridicule that they used the strawman being ridiculed as a template for their public persona? 

Honestly, I'm not sure I can. And that's one of the main reasons that I haven't tried bringing back the news show. The other is that I had a really busy main job, that I quit right when the crypto bubble burst in what may next year go down as the worst idea I've had since switching to Windows 10 or trying to mansplain to an anti-vaxxer how to read a technical document.  But now, I think I need to bring the show back, there's just too much absolute crap flying around and there needs to be something to swat it out of the air and fling it back at the ones that threw it. The problem is that these are often people that are so far gone that they can't even understand satire or parody, so I have to come up with a new way. An obvious way. 

And that's not the only challenge in revamping the news. The problem with a news show is that it will always be dependent on the news. I often had a lot more fun doing the bits between the news themselves, like the fake ads and fake interviews with fake "people". So maybe coming back with a news show won't be the right way. You know what's popular these days? Really shitty late night talk shows. Craig Fergusson's Late Late Show was probably the only one that was self aware of how shitty these shows are, hence a pantomime horse and a gay robot skeleton. So maybe that would be the right formula. Talk shows do have a news segment, mostly made out of monologues, they have guests, they have stupid, stupid segments, it's a horrid format for a show so tearing it apart in the process of tearing apart news, events, ideas, stereotypes, assholes, wouldn't be a bad idea. Morning shows tend to be just as horrible, so there's room to expand.

There's still work that needs to be done on the concept, most important of all is figuring out how to shoot it, when to shoot it, how long it can take so that developing it doesn't stretch for too many hours. A big advantage I have now is a much better camera that will make filming easier, and make the end result a lot more usable. Also, the desk I have now is a bit more versatile than the table I was working with 5 years ago.  I still haven't managed to clone myself, so having guests on the show will still require quick-changes and getting the timing right. But with the extra time I have at my disposal currently, It would be doable... well, until I have to get another second job, because of the crypto slump. 

April seems like a good time to start. I may have to kill off another show to do it, maybe have it every 2 weeks at first. And there's also the issue of what it will actually be. And by that, I mean, will it be a reboot, a totally new thing, or a continuation of the old series. The people that watch that one would certainly love to see some of the old characters again, the old "sets", the in-jokes, but anyone new will be left out in the cold, because the originals aren't in English. Now, I could go back and translate them all into English, which should be doable by 2023, but I'd rather not do that. Maybe a vague "previously on" segment, an Episode 0... a musical even? After all, even though it was a "news" show, it developed its own story as time went on, and it ended with everyone dying of laughter. Exploding, actually. Eh, we'll see what happens, won't we? Now if I can just find my old tie.