Steamy Potential
Award-winning Australian comedians Nic Conway and Dan Murnane are wholly unqualified to write TV series pilots. Yet here we are, week after week, pitching show after show of completely unmakeable television in our search for the fabled pearl of Hollywood. Even if it means shucking thousands of food-poisoning oysters along the way.
Episodes
We start this episode discussing the terrible sinful crimes of Hugh Jackman, and end it discussing the holiness of a character to be played by Hugh Jackman. I'm starting to think we need an embargo on discussing HJ, but maybe we should just stop talking about German brother-to-brother incest, and then he'll just naturally stop coming up.
Sometimes you just get two ideas that feel like part of a spiralling-downwards pattern. And that's what we have here: A body-inversion reality show, and a genre-inversion documentary series. But it might help to think of them as a spiralling-upwards kind of a trend. Because if you're flipped upside-down, that's what our podcast would look like. Spiralling upwards towards freedom.
Imagine if Christopher Nolan kind of winged the plot of Tenet on-the-fly during filming, and you'll get the half-baked concoction of our first time-travel nugget. Turns out time inversion is really hard to think about while you're also trying to be Professional Friends. We return to our core competency for the second pitch: the rules of the Santa Clause universe.
This one's hitting the waves a little late, since we did some due diligence on a pitch and decided that it had a little too much Fritzl Flavour - even for us. So we went back to the cutting room floor, scooped up some nail trimmings and old condoms and produced a replacement pitch. Together, these two pitches represent Jon Hamm's biggest legacies: The marketing wizard Don Draper, and a swingin' dong. We gently salute him for that i...
Come with us on a journey to the bottom of the barrel. Let's hang out amongst the sludge and algae that congeals at the bottom of every website: The Chum Box. We spend the better part of this episode re-discovering our love of this beautiful piece of internet paraphenalia, then string it into a loose premise for a TV show.
We also chisel what is essentially a hallucination into a statue that resembles the Matrix 4, but as a TV sho...
Today we travel back - back in time. But not too far. Just to a simpler time, when every boy was a nerd-hero, every girl was the girl-next-door, and every night was Prom Night. Then we travel to another place where everyone is awkwardly trying to get laid: North Korea. Which, now that I think about it, is like one huge never-ending prom, everyone slow-dancing to 50s music, putting on a show for each other, and nervously wondering h...
Okay, since we went pretty hard on Schitt's Creek in this one, I want to walk it back a little. I'll offer a complement schitt sandwich. Complement: Stevie is a revelation. Criticism: Now, listen to this episode of Steamy Potential. Complement: At a 22-minute runtime and 13 episodes a season, you could add a silence-trimmer to this bad boy and breeze through all 6 seasons in about 4 hours.
We also talk about regional tennis round ...
This week, our first guest appearance comes in the form of one Aradie Walters, who helps tear our pitches a new one. And she's just in time: We have to celebrate Christmas as a family! Santa features in our first pitch, and is quickly killed off. Indeed, the spirit of Christmas is quickly killed off in this episode as the subsequent pitches diverge from any seasonal relevance.
To those who celebrate it: Merry Christmas one and all...
Today we ride a very high horse (thanks), and take the theatre world down a notch. You can do that when you've perfected the art yourself, hence our comfort in criticising all these well-meaning idiots.
There were a bunch of times where we said "Space Mutt" in this episode, when of course we meant "Ghost Mutt". The latter is a Simpsons reference. The former is nothing. We apologise for the interruption. Have a nice day. We also talk about some TV shows that would never get made or find an audience. But all of that is par for the course at this point. Again, have a lovely day.
Best regards,
S. Potential (esq.)
In this episode, we trend towards making these shows marketable. From gym entrepreneurship to selling sex(lessness) to reaching an Indian audience, I guess we're actually starting to think about the step after a show is made: Who watches this stuff? I hope it's a trend that does not continue. We shouldn't be constrained by the whims of a disgusting audience.
Calling all nature lovers - we really take our time devouring the profession of naturopathy. You'd think we had a grudge against it, but in fact the only grudge we have is against the concept of character comedies. And that's why our second pitch has patently zero character development, with a complete smash cut reset of all character arcs every episode. Our final pitch involves Britain's grumpiest chef, America's most diminutive r...
Spade's back baby! David returns to revive his most lauded role in an already much-lauded career. His family loves scandal and rumour-mongering. Then we bounce around how a person would spend their lottery bucks - with money as the wedge in our second show's family relationships. The final family drama revolves around the most universal point of conflict for a family: Roger "Good Tennis Boy" Federer.
After an ernest discussion about ernestness in television, we begin our pitches in ernest. And what a skip's scramble we've got for you. The menu includes an appetiser of two culturally superior idiots, followed by a main course of explosive heart syndrome. And for desert, we have the Simpson (you thought I'd misspelled dessert huh?), which is the filming location of the final pitch. What a stretch.
Weirdly we both converge on pitches involving impersonation. We discuss impersonation etiquette, impersonator skin-wearing techniques, how to replace a family with impersonators. But most importantly, Sherlock and Moriarty battle wits in the ultimate showdown, as diminutive scholars riding megafauna.
Our favourite Hot Wok Jungle Noodle Bar is immortalised in television history, as we inject its head chef into a MacGyveresque role. This provokes the Rake Dilemma: What unspeakable things are left to use as story material, if you can't use anything in the first season of Rake? The answer to this is vitally important to figuring out what The Incident could be.
In fact, we use this concept of A Magnificent Event, or an Unspeakable I...
Muses for this episode include a REAL family of Italian ex-royals, a REAL priest that murders his way across New Zealand (inasmuch as priests are real), and a REAL pair of friends combined from popular franchises (inasmuch as friendships can be real). It's proof that life can be stranger than fiction sometimes!
And almost for the last time, publisher's note: We do keep saying the title of the podcast is "Professional Friends", but...
This one's got legs - a tangled mess of octopus legs that grab at any idea that comes along. And boy, there's some TV classics getting snared in our octopus web today. Do you think a spider and an octopus could survive if they switched places? TM.
On that note, we pitch: a Trading Places for a dead jazz musician; a unicorn start-up idea thinly veiled as a feel-good Offspringesque Aussie dramedy; and a gossipy village soap opera, s...
If you could go back in time and kill - no wait - seduce Hitler, how many times would you do it? 10? 1000? A notorious romantic, we posit a world where history's bad-boy is out-romanced by our main character in order to avert a genocide. Would it alienate an audience? More importantly, will our discussing it alienate our audience? These, and many other questions (e.g. How do you build a Handmaid's Tale Semen-milking Machine? How do...
This week, as we do every year (only this year for the first time we recorded the audio), we compete against each other for most Emmy-able TV show. And, as we do every year, we realise we don't quite know the rules of the competition. Aside from that, the Emmy showdown pitches Nic's blade-running fall-guy, coming-of-age, reality-show with its cast of huge stars against Dan's single half-baked premise: what if there were more than o...
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