What Would “The Bellman Chronicles: The Series” Look Like Anyway?

It will come as no surprise to the dozen of you who read this blog that I would very much like to see a live-action television series based on the contents of this space finally come to life.

But it still hasn’t.

However, one can dream, right? After all, it wasn’t all that long ago that an adolescent version of The Hook sat by himself in his room and imagined what his life as a grown-up would be like. He dreamed of:

•  What it would be like to not wake up afraid of making it through the day.
•  Of nights free of inevitable, inescapable nightmares.
•  A life shared with a soul-mate.  (Though he had no idea just what a soul-mate actually was.)
•  What it would be like to be a part of something bigger than himself.
•  Whether or not he’d ever get the chance to be the sort of parent he wished he had.

Decades later those dreams have all come true. Though to be honest, I still face the occasional nightmare, I piss my wife off on a daily basis and my daughter often holds me to task for the collective sins of my gender (and those sins are really mounting up these days) but overall, I think Young Hook would be pleased with how his life turned out.

Who am I kidding? Young Hook would be overjoyed at the fact he finally got to see a woman with her bra off, to say nothing of the rest of her. So I’ve certainly done right by my younger self. But now I’d like to start working on my adult dreams.

Wait, that didn’t sound right…

Or maybe it did. I mean, I certainly still have adult dreams, but they’re more than just adult dreams, they’re adult dreams.

You get it, right?

At any rate… at the moment there are two items I’d love to cross off my list and since it’s beyond the scope of my (mostly) mortal powers to bring Rockin’ Ronnie back, getting a blog-inspired TV series out there is now at the top.

Now onto the point. (“Finally!”, right?) What the hell would I actually do if I had the chance to write a series based on my life? Well, I’m glad you asked…

Television producers: There’s a story behind every door just waiting to be told from my unique point-of-view.

 

ONE)  A pilot unlike any other.  Let’s face it, between Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, Amazon Prime, traditional cable (who still watches that?) and the gazillion other platforms out there, the television-watching public has seen pretty much everything by now. Puppets. Cartoons for grown-ups. Vampires. Zombies. Reality up the wazoo. And so on and so on. It’s all out there for the watching.

So what’s left to show that we haven’t seen before?

How about a “clip show” for the first episode? I’d showcase “scenes” from the supposed-history of a Bellman Chronicles series in the pilot. Of course, the cast would have to film an entire season’s worth of brief scenes before the pilot aired but I’d see to it that they’re all duly-compensated with free hams and chocolate milk. Granted, this approach would leave viewers feeling like they’ve missed numerous which they would then seek out online, only to come up short. This in turn would leave the viewing public filled with rage and frustration.

But that would just be a nice bonus.

 

TWO)  A variation on the classic Seinfeld “Waiting for a table at a Chinese restaurant” episode.  Bellmen and other hotel service personnel literally spend hours every day waiting for an elevator to show up. All that waiting can lead to some entertaining moments, such as:

1.  Workers that lose track of time: five minutes become fifteen and so on. And the rage only builds…
2.  Someone always begins to kick and smash the elevator doors. And then someone always winds up in the ER with a sprained wrist or foot. Good times. 
3.  Inevitably, one of the service elevator doors opens and a copulating couple appears. Sexual frustration is fun to behold, kids – when it isn’t happening to you, of course.
4.  The banter that results when employees share their frustration while waiting for a metal box to arrive so they can get on with their various mind-numbing tasks is never boring. And it always involves an unbelievable amount of cursing. Like, so much cursing…
5.  There’s always one guy that opens the service entrance door, sees that the elevator is nowhere close to arriving, shouts, “Fuck this!” and leaves, all in one nanosecond.

The average real-time wait for an elevator is fifteen minutes. (At least.) So you can see how easy it would be to fill twenty-two minutes, right?

 

This happens all the time… Seriously.

 

THREE)  Hookers! Hookers! Hookers!  Call girls are funny. Especially the Niagara Falls variety. Trust me on this. Granted, I’d be sure to showcase their humanity as well as their… everything else. But shining a spotlight on the story that leads a woman to sell her body for money is where my television offering would stand apart from the pack.

 

See how happy this young lady is at the prospect of being a part of my fictional-but-not-really universe?  Multiply that by ten and you’ve got my demographic, people!

 

FOUR)  The scripts would write themselves.  Seriously, in my case, truth really is stranger than fiction. The stories on my blog really happened, people. For that matter, my life has always been equally… shall we say, “charmed”?

So who needs writers when your life is a work of art in its own right? Actually, scratch that, I’d still need a writer’s room; I’m not talented enough to translate all the shit that’s happened in my life to a series of scripts all by my lonesome.

 

 

FIVE)  The Bellman Chronicles would boldly go where no one has gone before.  Whenever people hear what I do for a living they say the same thing… every… single… time, “Wow. I bet you have a million stories!”

You bet your sweet bippie I do.

I’d take people where they’ve never been before. Those “STAFF ONLY” signs? Forget them! You’d be treated to an all-access look behind-the-crazy-scenes of a thousand room hotel nestled in the furiously-beating heart of one of the world’s natural wonders. You think you know what goes on in a hotel, viewers?

You have no idea.

Births in hotel hallways. Deaths in hotel bathrooms. Sex on laundry room folding tables. RCMP sting operations gone awry because a front desk clerk made a simple room switch. A valet deck usurped by the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan’s bodyguards (who refused to let me deliver his luggage unsupervised by a guard who was visibly packing heat). Dozens of celebrities like Pink (who can dish out a stare so icy Killer Frost would be envious) who often throw everyone into a tailspin with direct commands for the staff like, “Never acknowledge this particular guest, who doesn’t wish to eclipse their spouse in terms of fame and recognition”. (Yep.)

The list goes on, thankfully.

 

And that’s just the tip of the televised, live-action iceberg. My point – and I do have one – is this: if I’m ever fortunate enough to have the opportunity to rot all your brains with my unique genius I hope I can bring some of these ideas and many more, into play.

Until then, see you in the lobby, friends…