Seconds

“But she came and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’ And he answered, ‘It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.’ She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.’”

Matthew 15:25-27

Fauna and Amy, two ostracized LAPD detectives, try to combat corruption in the department, but everything changes when a terrorist who can clone himself at will announces his opus: his replicated army will kill a set number of notable authoritarians every month, be them dictators, CEOs, or cops.

Fauna and Amy try to weed out corruption, racism, and brutality in their numbers; the pair know that cops who go against cops don’t stay long, but need these jobs to barely pay their rent. Suddenly, the three wealthiest people around the world are killed on the same night—maybe even the same second—with no suspects, no DNA, even the bullets themselves vanishing. 

Meanwhile, a Detroit man named King has discovered he can multiply into as many versions of himself as he wants, with these “Seconds” being able to multiply off as well. Needs a poker partner? He can make a whole casino of players. Has a dollar in his pocket? Multiply to make two, three, a million. Somebody kills him? All his Seconds he created die in the same moment, as well as all their cloned dollars, bullets: everything they had with them when replicated. Find and fill the original King? Every Second in the world is gone.

Richard King, a Second living in LA, confesses to Fauna and Amy that the Kings are behind the phenomenal murders and this was just the beginning: every month, the Kings plan to kill the five wealthiest people on the planet, bomb the four highest polluting companies, bomb the three police departments with the highest levels of brutality, kill the two U.S. politicians who took the most campaign donations, and kill one world leader at random. They’re your friendly neighborhood terrorist organization but with infinite membership; a swarm of smart zombies; both a unified population but, in the end, just one person.

Fauna, Amy, and Richard must work together to figure out how to stop this terrorist plot, but also confront the questions they have to ask themselves: how much of this is actually evil? How much of this may actually fix things?

SETTING

Present day Los Angeles.

TONE

There’s plenty of action and suspense, but the core is philosophical confrontation in a postmodern society: what have we been told to want and what have we been told are our means? What have we been taught about ethics, and why? What does it mean to be an autonomous and free person? Are we even different people, or just different circumstances?

On the fun side, Fauna and Amy have a quippy chemistry that gives the show its needed levity, and as the first season goes on, we’ll see the Kings from around the world organizing and bickering: a roomful of the same humorous guy fighting about “how much bomb” one really needs for a factory already shoving natural gas into pressurized containers, rather than just removing their No Smoking sign and calling it a successful terrorist attack.

AUDIENCE APPEAL

• To more and more of our audiences, the officer’s uniform is no longer disciplined but impugned. Authority is less about safety and more about, well, authoritarians. Cops who break the rules are no longer romantic rogues, but the bad guys. The Cop Show has been killed by the cops. 
• To more and more of our audiences, capitalism is no longer a house with a picket fence but rather a foreclosure. Wealth is less about greed and more about wrath. The philanthropist is no longer altruistic, but condescending. There is no coexistence with the powerful, but restraint by the populus—a lust for equalization by any means.
• As Watchmen and The Boys have pulled from audience fervor, superheroes are the enemies of equality. To be given divine right is to reside with creators rather than creations: superpowers are involuntarily dictatorial.
• The next hero won’t have the impossible strength of a hundred people, but rather be a hundred people combining their strengths themselves.

WHY MAKE THIS SHOW TODAY

When TVs landed in people’s homes, the theatre had to recognize that the grandest mammoths still went extinct. I say this as a working playwright: theatre had to recognize it would only be a novelty for the elderly and wealthy unless it exploded every year with desperate revelations; confrontations no longer against just tradition, but against the too-slow-of-evolvers. It realized that if you don’t make an equitable effort to be the home of the advanced, you’ll fade with the easygoing.

TV isn’t booming: it’s undergoing a supernova. With social media allowing users to create and exchange entertainment and ideology, TV is a god in a land of growing non-believers. It’s a mammoth that thinks its size means no glacier could hold it. The only TV that will survive is the one that can move fastest.