Who cares about the over-franchised brand of reality programmes that are pushed down our throats by pay-TV and streaming services when we have jaw-dropping original stories right under our noses.
What a brouhaha the franchise junkies caused when the third season of the Real Housewives of Joburg was cancelled because of unending conflicts between the production team. Even the recently named Gqeberha has its own reality series.
But there’s plenty of original stories locally that are dying to be told on our small to big screens.
This international women’s month was an exceptionally inspirational one for those with a neck of telling stories for the screen.
For starters we have a student who one morning, after a humdrum night of eating instant noodles and procrastinating on starting with that one assignment due the next week, woke up to find that she’s a multi-millionaire.
What would you do if you went to bed broke and then woke up to find that your funding scheme had deposited all the allowances for students in all of South Africa’s varsities for the month into your account?
We know she blew R800 000 of that money balling hard? What if she didn’t get caught? What would she have done?
I’m curious, aren’t you, especially about what someone with a limitless imagination and creative licence can do with a story like that.
Or the story of the drop-dead gorgeous young doctor who we thought was living the Madiba dream, hob-knobbing with society’s who’s who, driving the flashiest of cars and being the neighbour of South Africa’s number-one Ankole society’s citizen – but has deep dark secret?
The secret: she is dangerously in love with a convicted murderer and rapist.
There are so many seasons or parts to this story that it can beat the runs of the Fast and Furious movies franchise.
Could the angle of an aspirant doctor who fell in love with an aspirant theologist, but they were separated by circumstances and only to later realise that their love is so strong they cannot live without each other.
Her, now a doctor with a successful practice frequented by the crème de la crème of the City of Gold’s high society and him, a globe-trotting media mogul.
They rekindle their love only for the young doctor to realise that he is not who she thought he was, but she’s so deeply entangled in his life of lies that there’s no way out.
Or to satisfy junkies who are highly addicted to reality drama franchise about housewives, we start our proudly South African franchise – The Real Makotis of Mzansi’s Danyanes.
In this thrill-a-second series we can focus on the women – and men who fall head over heels in love with lifers in South Africa’s jails.
I suggest the first series to be called The Real Makotis of Mangaung Correctional Centre.
In this series no torture, high wall, 24-hour cameras, armed guards can get in the way of scheming, scamming, killing, perjuring, covering up, running away.
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