I am personally really interested in television and how TV shows are written and created. For this final project, I chose to adapt the all American ABC program Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives is a primetime television series that depicts middle class families in the suburbs. I decided to take the idea of family and friends in a close-knit community, but place them in a climate-changed world.

I chose to write the pilot script of a new television show that takes place in 2046 suburbia. The characters are facing different and new challenges because suburbia no longer exists in the lavish housewife way. Women are struggling to gather water and feed their families because of the uncontrollable wildfire that just ran across the Midwest. The only way for a once successful businessman to provide for his family is by spending hours working in the fields. It is still called the fields even though it is now burnt down to nothing. It is a man’s job to try to clean and clear the area, so harvesting can hopefully begin again. I think writing a pilot script is an interesting way to tell a story because it allows for the reader to understand the characters and the way they live.

Penelope Owen is a young married woman living on Jasmine Way who is the narrator in the entire series. At the beginning of the pilot episode Penelope commits suicide and the reason is unknown to everyone including her husband. She says, “Normally there’s nothing exciting about my life, but that all changed last Tuesday. It was a typical day at first. I went to the well for water, washed my hair, and made my husband a sardine sandwich. I spent the day as I had spent any other day since the Miranda wildfire. It was so shocking when late last Tuesday I decided to take a piece of coarse rope, tie it around the banister, and let my feet come out from under me” (Salcido 1). This is how the first episode begins of my climate change housewife television series. I wanted to catch the script reader on the first page because a viewer can lose interest if something doesn’t happen in the first three minutes of a TV show.

Writing this script has been entertaining, but also challenging because I had to incorporate elements that I had not thought about like camera direction and scene. I had to really think about how I wanted the scenes to look and the direction I wanted to go.