With the unveiling of its Big Bang Theory prequel Young Sheldon, CBS has made the audacious bet that what didn’t work for The Carrie Diaries will work for the network – namely, the notion that audiences are willing to love a pint-size version of their favorite TV characters just as much as the genuine article. While previews of Young Sheldon have not inspired optimism, the original’s success was always baffling in its own way, so who’s to say this won’t be a mega hit as well? With that in mind, we’ve compiled a pitch memo in an effort to get out in front of the wave of youthsploitation soon to overtake the airwaves.
Young Tony Soprano
Saturday Night Live went and made an anachronistic mockery out of the concept, but Tony’s childhood did factor significantly into The Sopranos’ unsparing psychological dissection of its subject. The show’s creator, David Chase, was liable to slip back in time for the occasional flashback to formative traumas in Tony’s boyhood years during the late 60s and early 70s; one incident involving misappropriated deli meats wields all the terrifying emotional power of a buried youth memory.
What fun it would be, then, to get a full series’ worth of the chilling normalized abuse that ran rampant in the Soprano household! It’d have all the classic pop and rock musical cues of the original series, with at least three times the panic attacks and stress-vomiting. Plus, viewers can get to know Tony’s enigmatic father, Johnny Boy, and bear witness to the full brunt of a prime-years Livia Soprano’s boundless contempt.
Louie’s teen years
Louis CK’s semi-autobiographical existential comedy traverses the entire breadth of human experience in its interrogations of everything from parenthood to coming-of-age to coming-of-middle-age. A few interludes look back on a nervous, flawed Louie during his boyhood years, joining him as he has a junior crisis of faith in one instance, and while he purchases cannabis from a sketchy neighborhood fellow in another. CK is particularly astute when it comes to putting the looming anxieties and confusions of early ages into visual terms; he can create the same stomach-pit fear a trip to the headmaster’s office brings.
Teen Louie would chronicle the comic’s adolescence, sparing no sexual humiliation or depressive episode. But of course there’s a gimmick: just as Louie freely recast recurring roles from episode to episode, the teenaged reboot would hire a new actor for the lead role in each installment, almost like an anthology of personnel. Slap a red wig and prosthetic paunch on pretty much anyone, and they’re good to go.
Lil’ Dick Whitman
This spiritual follow-up to The Sopranos also spun a backstory of woe for its troubled protagonist, linked a bit more closely to the ethically compromised origins of his nation. Our man Don Draper was born a penniless country boy, Dick Whitman, a prostitute’s orphaned son who grew up picking johns’ pockets at the local brothel. Dick swaps identities with a dead soldier during the chaos of a firefight during the Korean war, and upon his return to the US, he completely reinvents himself as a distinctly American sort of striver.
There’s great drama and pathos baked right into his life story, but that means the challenge lies in figuring out the benefits to making explicit that which was previously left implied. Obvious work-around: super-hot Dick Whitman. The teens will eat it up like so much theft-reward chocolate – a joke that this show’s undoubtedly vast audience will come to appreciate.
I Love Lucy: The Early Years
The mother of all domestic sitcoms always took a greater interest in Lucy and Ricky’s present than their past. One episode detailed the auspicious meeting of the romantic leads during a 1940 cruise to Cuba that Lucy took with her trusty galpal Ethel, where she met and summarily fell for the bewitching Ricky while he was working as her tour guide. Lucy scored the musician a traveling orchestra gig that got him passage to the US, and the rest is history; but so much of that history has gone unwritten.
Picture an epic romance bridging racial boundaries in a time of intolerance, with nothing short of global war as its backdrop. As the United States decides to intervene in the second world war, Lucy and Ricky navigate treacherous social waters in New York City during their wholesome courtship. Of course there would be hijinks galore, and of course they’d be sleeping in separate beds. How better to capture the coveted “viewers who have fallen asleep tuned into TV Land” demographic?
Bluth Family Memories
Few TV families have baby books as disturbing, emotionally sadistic, and lightly treasonous as the main clan from cult sitcom Arrested Development. Indeed, the rearing of Michael, Buster, GOB, and Lindsay at the hands of their diabolical mother, Lucille, was the butt of constant jokes over their three seasons. From the amateur child-sparring videos sold under the title Boyfights, to the one-armed man used to scare the kids straight, to the all-out war of attrition Lucille waged on Buster’s fragile psyche, their family tree is gnarled and diseased.
The jokes all but wrote themselves when the polarizing fourth season stepped back in time to cast Kristen Wiig and Seth Rogen as the Bluth parents’ younger selves. They’re practically figures of Greek tragedy in their stuporous hubris, and watching the kids get caught in the crossfire was a reliable source of laughs. If nothing else, turn the show into a solo vehicle for Baby Buster.
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