(For instance, if I were a lot smarter, I would drag that one out ALL THE TIME.)

(Only tangentially related: One more reason that “Better Off Ted” is a recent Greatest Show Ever: Phil and Lem do not consider themselves Mad Scientists, even though their bowling shirts would claim otherwise.)

In my dream plotline, what we first apprehended as a kind of monolithic evil conspiracy among MKU’s Alumni (like if Yale were really evil the way David Icke thinks they are) would be gradually revealed as a bitterly divided, fractious group of people who all have their own individual goals, further muddying up who the “good guys” and the “bad guys” are.

Do they think of themselves as mad scientists? Is that really the term they would use? Shouldn’t there be some form of self- or outward-denial? What do normal people know about this college? Does it have an outward face? Have the alums helped shape happenings in the outside world? Hopefully not in a “these people have helped shape every major event in human history” way but in a “the staff of this school has a nefarious scheme that is so counter to what you normally think of as a nefarious scheme that it’s been happening for a really long time and no one noticed” way?

(I’ve actually planned for the end of the series, but I haven’t really discussed those ideas with Holland, yet.)

Sadly, you’re probably also right that I’d be unlikely to get the at least five seasons that I’d want out of it, but I’d be happy with myself if I could make a solid one or two season cult hit.

As for the story and feel and such I think that one of the biggest mistakes writers of TV shows to is to have only one story arc at a time. It usually ends up feeling disjointed and breaks immersion into the show’s world as one story arc replaces another like a badly stitched sweater or something. What I’d like to see, in tiny, tiny bits, of course, would be a power struggle/political maneuverings kind of thing between the dean, the other professors and/or the board of trustees. Also, one of the biggest pitfalls for show like this is the tendency for “monster of the week” kind of thing. Also, also, bad actors… do I really need to elaborate on that?

As I said, I’d love to see this show on TV but, to be honest, I doubt it would appeal to many people that are not already Lovecraft fans but pitched in the right way to the right people, it might become a single season cult thing, like American Gothic and others.

I am ten hours away from this crappy ol’ body turning 30. And man-o-man, would I get a subdermal swimming tattoo in an instant.

OH, right, “Miskatonic University.” Yeah, Braak and I had a very good time concocting this proto-series bible, and I firmly believe it will see some level of fruition at some point. Maybe not as the aborted webseries Braak attempted, but if I ever get my hands on a wacom tablet, perhaps one day as a comic.

(Right after I start drawing new “Hand of Danger” episodes. Of which we have a few scripts now. Aaaaaany day now.)

I also want a department of post-death studies, where people learn to talk to the dead, raise the dead, reanimate corpses, extract remaining life-force, etc.

Think of the pranks you could pull if you could talk to your room-mate’s dead girlfriend!

Later, whacked out on glue fumes he remodels the room, altering the very walls just so. When the screaming subsides and the EMTs are paid off the RA busts him for keeping dogs in the dorm.

“You want to make a serum to reanimate the dead? Here’s a million dollars. Do it. You want to build a machine that lets your brain visit alien dimensions of horror? What would you need to make that work?”

You’d be able to fold it into a kind of, “Just going to college mentality”–the human experience of going to college and discovering not just that the world is much bigger than you’d ever imagined, but that it’s full of people who understand more about it than you do, with the idea that the science you’ve been learning throughout your life is a parochial shadow of the real work.