Oooo, I like it.
This could actually be hilarious. I’m not quite sure how I feel about President Zelensky actually starring in it. I can’t imagine him playing a character, but I could see him making a lot of guest appearances as himself.
I’d watch.
What have we got for the mid-season cliff-hanger?
The commandos are captured, but because they speak better Russian than the draftees who captured them, they’re not just able to talk their way out of trouble, but order the Russian draftees to go back home.
At the very least there’s a Funny or Die video here.
I watched a dozen or so episodes of Servant of the People. I think Zelenskyy could do just fine in that sort of show.
And yes, I’d watch.
The draftees take their prisoners home – to Lviv, where they are welcomed by the citizens and start learning to speak Ukrainian (which is pretty similar to Russian) and apply for citizenship.
I’ve been wondering if Olena Zelenska, Zelenskyy’s wife, has been behind some or a lot of that. She is, after all, a writer of political satire and comedy. That’s how they met - she was a writer for his production company.
A part of me would like an end to this war and a return to circumstances where she could go back to screenwriting and her husband could return to acting and comedy. Not sure that’s possible, but one can dream.
The Team is tasked with rescuing a few thousand civilians who are set to be deported to Russia. The cliffhanger ending is a shot of hundreds of trucks driving out of the camp, presumably to a destination within Russia.
The next episode starts with the trucks arriving in Kherson, because as President Putin declared, it is “Now and forever a part of Russia!” The Russian guards all get arrested.
What would the show’s opening credits be like? Would it maybe tell a story like Gilligan’s Island or Beverly Hillbillies, or would it open with some other appropriately light-hearted meme-ish thing. Like a VGA graphics kinda intro thing with an animated Putin announcing ‘All your base are belong to us’?
Nah, we play it straight, like a normal “war show” kind of opening, like for Season 5 of The Last Ship:
All hard core, guns a-blazing, jump out of helicopters manly man stuff. But then it’s all just hijinks.
Another episode has to be a Rashomon style unreliable narrator story.
Thread one is the Ukrainian commander being debriefed after their mission. Thread two is a Russian POW being interrogated about the events, who was clearly drunk the whole time, and now is just grateful to be out of the whole mess and willing to say anything. Thread Three is another Russian who made it back to his commanders alive, who is of course telling a tale to cover his own ass.
And he is totally self-effacing, claiming that the Ukr unit got lost and just bumbled around in the dark, then went back to base.
The Ukrainian POW’s story is full of very odd occurrences, and after every one, when he’s asked what he did next, he says, “Well, I sat down and had a drink to think about it.”
“You had a drink?”
“Well, it was my first drink of the day!”
“Do you realize you’ve had >flips back through notes< eleven “First drinks of the day” so far?”
“…I may have had a few second drinks in there…”
The Team is tasked to destroy a new prototype of a joint Russian/Iranian tank being sent for testing on the front lines.
At the same time, rumors start spreading amongst a company of poorly trained Russian conscripts that the Notorious Ukrainian commandos are about to attack them. When the new tank shows up, the conscripts open fire on it with everything they have.
“Wait, how do we know that’s a Ukrainian tank?”
“Look at it, Boris! It’s not a rusty piece of shit!”
The Iranian engineers spend the whole episode making disparaging remarks about the Russians, but it’s all in Farsi with subtitles, so none of the Russians catch on.
Are you by any chance a writer for television?
No. I did spend several years making NWO Kitty comics on another site, though, so I have some ability at story telling. A lot of the early work was lost in the wilds of the Internet, but some are still there.
I’ve found an off-line version of that comic generator, so I might make a few with these story ideas. They’ll be more basic in their look, though, as the off line version doesn’t have nearly as many tools for creating unique characters and objects.
Geez, you all are really creative! The best idea I had was some kind of wacky “Putin/Poutine” mixup. And we never have to have Zelenskyy onscreen. Just a double shot from the back of a person’s head. Until the last episode when he really does show up.
Let’s not forget the homage scenes to classic movies.
The commandos are drinking in a cafe. There’s a group of Russians drinking on the other side of the room. The Russians start singing the Russian National Anthem. Sergiy tells the band (who look like the Blues Brothers) to play the Ukraine anthem, which the rest of the cafe starts singing. While the drunken commandoes look on, the cafe patrons then jump the Russian soldiers, beat them up, tie them and lock them in the local jail.
We’d need one show that kinda plays with the premise a bit.
One of the commandos, having an existential crisis about his worth (and perhaps something about his family behind Russian lines) deserts during their toughest mission yet. The rest of the team, getting closer to their objective, gets pinned down by the one competent Russian unit in the oblast. Suddenly, a Russian general appears and orders the unit off the front line to escort some Ukrainian civilians to the rear. The commandos creep closer to the general, who turns - and it’s the deserter, who both saved the unit and brought his family (or love interest?) out from behind the lines to get them set up in safety in Kyiv or Lviv. Perhaps he could have a younger brother who hated him at the outset for abandoning their family but now wants to grow up to be just like him.
Most of the comedy would have to come from characters rather than the situation, but a good writer could put a few dozen gags into a half-hour show.
It’s almost winter. Days get short.