That's Real Life, Baby!

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THE BRAVO NETWORK

(Home of Top Chef and Real Housewives)

[Redacted] MEMO

FROM: Brittney Silverstein, Asst. Vice Director of Program Development

TO: Megan Greenberg: Deputy Director of Mega-Revenue Enhancement

RE: Pitch for New Show in the 12 to 73 yr.-old demographic

DATE: Black Friday

CC: The Board

PRIORITY: High

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The team reviewed a pitch for a new show from a Mrs. XXXXXX tentatively titled "Cooking on the Moon." The report and team reaction follow.

Synopsis: Contestants will vie for prizes based on their ability to follow recipes and create new and imaginative dishes to the satisfaction of a panel of aging celebrities. Unlike the the slew of other competitive cooking programs currently on air, this one will be shot entirely on location on the Moon. Contestants will shuttle back and forth between the Moon and Whole Foods each week in search of unique and exotic spices, and will be graded on their ability to execute typical sous chef tasks in near weightlessness.

At the end of each episode, the contestant with the lowest score will be told: "You've been 238,857thed." (a reference to the number of miles between Whole Foods and the Moon). This will be the tagline for the beautiful, but severe, hostess who, although she will know absolutely nothing about cooking, will take obvious delight in nixing the hapless amateurs who dare to expose their culinary shortcomings in front of an inter-stellar cable audience. (The tagline: "Houston, we have a problem," was considered briefly, but rejected, as it was surmised that the license fees would be exorbitant). The weekly loser will then be instructed to "Please put on your helmet, and return to the ship." The grand winner will win a year's supply of spices from Whole Foods.

Strategic Issues: BRAVO will need to partner with NASA to construct a permanent base on the Moon and to shuttle contestants, judges, crew, a studio audience, and thousands of pounds of material and fuel back and forth between Whole Foods and the Moon. Craft from the Space Shuttle program will have to be commandeered for programming purposes, and additional craft will have to be constructed to re-supply each shoot. Participants will need to be fitted out with gravity boots (which are still in the experimental stage at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory). The Network should be prepared to budget for these expenses, but will lobby NASA and Whole Foods to shoulder a portion of the costs.

Problems: Mrs. XXXXXXXX insists that all of the contestants and judges have "real lips and chins," and be "tattoo and piercing-free." She has also decreed that contestants speak in grammatically correct and complete English sentences. Moreover, she insists that contestants be articulate enough to express their disappointment and frustration without resorting to expletives, obviating the need for the high-pitched "censor" beeps that have become the hallmark of this Network. She also believes that the focus of the program should be about food and cooking, and not the "petty jealousies of shallow nitiwits whoring themselves out for their 15 minutes of fame."

Mrs. XXXXXXX demands that contestants not be expected to give fake "filler" interviews to nobody but the camera operators filming them (from a sideways angle), recounting with "stunningly banal detail" the "surprise challenge" that has just been revealed to the audience in the previous scene. Finally, Mrs. XXXXXXX insists that the ratio of heterosexual to homosexual judges be 2:1, and that there be no Canadians or judges with British accents.

Other Problems: While some degree of compromise is possible here, the team was unanimous in wondering aloud whether Mrs. XXXXXXX was from another planet for insisting that amateur chefs be tattoo and piercing-free. Further, she seems totally unaware of the Network rules mandating a minimum of 12 censor beeps per episode. Obviously, her insistence that heterosexual judges predominate on a reality cable show would cause costs to skyrocket (no pun intended!), as the pre-production people would need to triple or quadruple the numbers of applicants to find a qualified candidate. Finally, her insistence that contestants be able to construct complete and correct spoken sentences is not only unrealistic and absurd, it is laughable in the extreme, as is her notion that a cooking show should be forced to jettison the childlike personality conflicts between the semi-talented and the not-so-adept wannabees who deign to appear.

The team was stunned by the suggestion that there be no judges with British accents, and frankly, thought it exhibited the kind of jingoism that we assumed had been relegated to the dustbin of history. Aside from the obvious undertones of discrimination and unfairness in her putative condition precedent, implementing such a protocol, even if it were humanly possible (which, of course, it is not) would be a logistical nightmare.

Action Plan: Despite the obvious flaws in Mrs. XXXXXXX's vision (which, at times, contribute to a science fiction fantasy of what is and is not possible to pull off on television today), the team decided that her core idea was still sound, and agreed to ready production for a series pilot, after securing the rights from Mrs. XXXXXX upon payment of adequate consideration. The team thought that having a Gordon Ramsey-like instructor berating contestants by taking them outside the base and pushing their inedible concoctions into their faces would be a classy touch, and we are studying ways that this can be accomplished without having the food fly off the handle, so to speak, and up into a perpetual orbit around the Moon. That, of course, is the easy part; getting someone who pushes plates of food into people's faces with the same panache as Gordon Ramsey has (AND who DOESN'T have a British accent!!!), does seem a pretty tall order.

While the the gravity boots are being perfected and the Moon Base is under construction, it was agreed that Toronto would serve as a stand-in for the Moon, and filming would commence there immediately. However, the proposed title, "Cooking on the Moon," seemed to the team to be stilted and hackneyed.

The team has approved a working title we think better suited to programming of this genre: "Boo-Yah!"