Maybe Christ Zero?
I’d love to see a sitcom about him, where every episode involves him somehow managing to pull off a harebrained but over-the-top scheme to defraud someone. They could write this as a farce, where the Santos character himself isn’t particularly competent, but always succeeds anyway due to an improbable series of coincidences, like Maxwell Smart in Get Smart. To be watchable, the victims would probably have to be (unbeknownst to Santos) even more reprehensible than him. That way viewers can laugh at a bumbling crook unwittingly stealing from worse crooks, rather than get outraged at watching innocent people being cheated.
Michael Pena would be perfect.
Series pilot: On a whim, Santos spends $5 to buy a framed reproduction of the Declaration of Independence at an estate sale. This gives him the idea for an elaborate plot to swap his copy with the real one displayed in the National Archives; this way the theft won’t be immediately noticed. He finds a black-market dealer who will pay handsomely for the original and who funds the elaborate, Mission Impossible–style solo heist that Santos has planned.
Hours before the heist, the news media is abuzz with the discovery that the “original” copy in the National Archives is actually a fake, but Santos doesn’t hear about it, being too busy with his preparations. (Cue a shot of his living room, decked out in security laser beams arranged to match the ones in the National Archives. Santos, dressed in a black catsuit, deftly manoeuvres his chubby body around the beams, oblivious to the TV in the background that is blaring the breaking news.)
That evening he breaks into the National Archives as planned and seemingly pulls everything off without a hitch. When he presents the stolen copy to the dealer the next day, the dealer is livid and berates Santos for wasting his money. Meanwhile the National Archives removes their supposedly fake copy of the Declaration, but upon closer examination they realize that it has been substituted with none other than the real Declaration of Independence! (Turns out Santos’s copy wasn’t a modern reproduction after all but a long-lost original.) The security camera footage reveals what happened, but not in enough detail to identify the perpetrator. Everyone assumes that the video doesn’t show a thief, but rather a patriotic citizen who had heard the news about the fake and was anonymously donating his own original copy. The National Archives rejoices, celebrates the anonymous hero, and offers him a reward for his selfless service to the nation.
Santos steps forward to identify himself as the hero, but nobody believes him.
That part is plausible, anyway
I’d say more likely we’ll find a very thinly disguised Santos expy as a (maybe recurring) guest character or a sub-plotline in some ongoing show, in the style so often done by Law & Order.
The money is earmarked to pay the court eventually, right?
It’s gonna have cooties though.
(emphasis mine)
In America, however, the grift continues. Remember - Jim Bakker was found with prostitutes of both genders, using church funds for personal gains, etc., and has had a reasonable post-prison career preaching the Prosperity Gospel to preppers.
BTW - that was a pretty good word salad there; reminded me of Stephen Colbert’s “Meanwhile” introductions.
A joke from Kimmel’s latest monologue, re: Santos going away: “We had to fire two writers - they have nothing to do now.”
That’s rewriting history. In real life, Santos didn’t succeed. We’ve all been watching him fail at his scheming. It would also be untrue to portray the Santos character’s victim as reprehensible. The people Santos lied to in real life were the voters in his own district.
I believe the pitch was for a sitcom, not a documentary.
But it’s a pitch for a sitcom that Psychonaut explicitly said was about Santos.
Too soon?
Remind me never to watch Blackadder with you. Nor The Life of Brian, nor History of the World: Part I, nor Up Pompeii, nor A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, nor any other comedy film or TV series that fictionalizes real-world historical characters for laughs.
According to Santos, he finds Christ every morning when he looks at the mirror.
I don’t object to rewriting history as a whole. What I object to is rewriting history in order to portray a current political figure, and his party, in a more benign light.
I guess about 20 years later would be OK then. I’m basing this on WW 2 ending in 1945 and Hogan’s Hero’s debuting in 1965.
Eye bleach! Eye bleach!