UNHINGED is a One-Hour Serialized Dystopian Dark Comedy for Basic or Premium Cable or Streaming.

A Supernova explodes just beyond the Earth’s atmosphere creating a massive Black Hole that threatens to suck the Earth into its void.  The Black Hole is prophesied, and perhaps manifested, by an unbalanced, manic, delusional Homeless Soup Kitchen Chef.  

SYNOPSIS:

Unhinged is a One-Hour Serialized Dystopian Dark Comedy for Basic or Premium Cable or Streaming.

A Supernova explodes just beyond the Earth’s atmosphere creating a massive Black Hole that threatens to suck the Earth into its void. The Black Hole is prophesied, and perhaps manifested, by an unbalanced, manic, delusional Homeless Soup Kitchen Chef.

The Earth faces destruction. Big deal. We’ve been here before. A meteor is hurdling towards our planet. Not a problem. Send Bruce Willis to the surface of the meteor and blow the damn thing up (Armageddon). Done and done. Or all strategies for destroying or deflecting the meteor fail and our planet is destroyed (Don’t Look Up). We’re still here even if Leonardo De Caprio and Jennifer Lawrence are not. So what?

Missing in the genre of End of the World movies and series has been anything more than a passing glance at how our impending doom would be felt by YOU and ME.

So, we learn the world may be coming to an end. How would we react? If the climate crisis has taught us anything, our sense of urgency is in direct proportion to how far out that expiration date is. Far enough into the future and our lives go on as usual. Close enough that you can schedule it on a calendar and we begin to panic.

What a Black Hole does is it sucks up all the space stuff within its gravitational pull, gaining mass and extending its reach until it exacerbates more climate disasters here, and our Earth, in what scientists refer to as Spaghettification, is ultimately stretched and sucked into its void. Wooosh, and we’re gone. The long and the short of it is we’re doomed and it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

What would this look like as a series?

FBI Special Agent Alex Mendel and her team are about to bring down Ex-Marine Noah Turco and his crew when the Black Hole appears. She’s then tasked with finding the source of a random post about the Black Hole on social media which brings her into contact with the Homeless Soup Kitchen Chef Blue.

Under FBI interrogation, Blue admits to both authoring the post and perhaps even for manifesting the Black Hole. Sorry, he says. Blame his curious undisciplined mind.

We’ll learn The Black Hole swells and burns and sucks space stuff in symbiosis with Blue. At the end of the series, we’re all gonna die. That’s a promise.

The Main Characters

Alexis Mendel is an ambitious all work no play FBI Special Agent trying to prove herself in a hyper masculine culture and, coming from a privileged upbringing, earn her place in the bureau. She is a smart, belligerent, over-achiever who privately resents having to cow tow to her male counterparts. And naturally, her personal life is a hot mess.

Noah Turco is a cynical ex-Marine and War Hero leading a crew of fellow veterans who take down banks because that's where the money is. He went into the military with a strong sense of purpose which in two tours, Iraq and Afghanistan, eroded due to the lack of mission and leadership that characterized both conflicts, coupled with guilt over a black bag mission that went horribly wrong.

And finally, we have Blue, an unbalanced, manic, delusional Homeless Soup Kitchen Chef who’s only way of functioning without spiraling out of control is by cooking. There is no official record of Blue; his full name or where he came from, and because he cycles through frames of mind and dispositions, the only way to describe him is according to his emotional states.

Series Structure

The Black Hole is the series MacGuffin, a trigger for the plot. And while who Blue is may be the central question we’ll explore in the series, the series driver is really the subjective and ambiguous theories about his identity, motive and the superpowers he’s rumored in social media to possess.

As strange as it sounds that he could be suspected of somehow manifesting the Black Hole, in the absence of a scientific explanation, Blue becomes the object of the world’s fears and suspicions for some, or either a divine warning or a savior for others. Bottom line, our propensity for killing the messenger means Blue’s life is in danger at every turn.

Blue becomes a target for competing government agencies, right-wing conspiracy groups, terrorists foreign and domestic, religious fanatics, new age cults, Area 51 freak shows, media moguls, Meta, Google, Elon Musk, the My Pillow Guy, Neal deGrasse Tyson, Scientologists and the Vatican. He’s vilified, mobbed, assaulted, kidnapped, glorified, worshipped and then kidnapped again.

Tone & Style

Snarky, sarcastic social commentary mostly. Every season will have a different tone and feel according to the 5 Stages of Grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. And if there’s the patience for it, let’s add a sixth season and call it The End

UNHINGED