Series Treatment

Fictive Forms

Treatment for a Television Programme written by Kirsty Louise Dunn

Channel 5

My programme is a psychological Drama which will be broadcasted on the Channel 5. The title of my piece will be called Vice or Virtue and will be aired at 10pm every Thursday.  The main idea for this programme is: A man is under hypnotism for being mentally unstable when he starts to see his life from another perspective, through the other characters roles and the Seven Deadly Sins. However this I would not want the spectators to see or know at this stage. A logline for the audience would be: A Insomniac Psychiatrist whose job it is to help others sees himself struggling with his own perspective on life and starts to become deeply involved with specific stories.  The programme will consist of 9 episodes and each episode will be approximately 60 minutes long scheduling time. My programme will be classed as an on-going series.  I will also show and question themes of Identity throughout Vice or Virtue by expressing gender issues, sexuality and mental illness as a form of disability.

The synopsis of my programme is: A man named Peter Virtue who has a wife and two daughters believes he is psychiatrist who also has insomnia is helping different people each week in each episode with the many different problems which occur in these specific characters’ lives.  However in reality Peter in fact is asleep throughout the duration of the series due to being hypnotised by a hypnotherapist who controls his mind to help him recover from his mental unstableness. As a spectator you never see this part of the programme. Each character that comes into his “office/dream” has a completely different story. Each story somewhat relates to the seven deadly sins of: Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy and Pride. And each episode is dedicated to one of these titles apart from the first episode and the last. Peter narrates throughout the series to show the emphasis is on him. The spectator will not know by this point of the seven deadly sins, however in the narration the titles of the sins come up at least once or twice through an episode. As the series starts to lead towards the end of the deadly sins Peter starts to feel more in depth with the stories being told through the different people’s lives.  The last episode however we see the programme title of Pride which now becomes peters story. He then begins to sum up the series by an in depth dialogue of the characters, the sins and his own life and it starts to paint a picture. Flashbacks begin and instead of the other characters playing the roles of his patience he sees himself. To end the series the character Peter awakes from sleep next to a hypnotist Susanna.

An episode I am going to go more in depth with is episode 9 when the character Peter begins to realise that his life is starting to connect with every story.  The opening of the episode starts with a scene of Peter being in his kitchen at the early hours of the morning. He is shown extremely stressed and extremely tired with narration of dialogue in the background explaining his emotions in a very odd manner. “Once again I’m stood here not knowing how I got here. Not knowing if I’ve even been to sleep or not” The dialogue is showing Peters confused mind. His wife enters the room and they speak briefly of his stress at work and she asks him to go back to bed. We do not see Peter fall asleep. The scene then cuts to him in his office filling out paper work not concentrating on the newest patient who walks in.  The newest patient introduces himself as Vice which relates to the title of the programme and the Idea of the Seven Deadly Sins. As Vice begins to tell Peter his background of a wife and two daughters we see this as a coincidence. He then goes on to tell his life story which starts to sum up the Seven stories of the seven sins and talks of how he can’t sleep. Throughout the scene we see similarities between the two characters and Vice mimics some of Peter’s movements. Peter starts to panic and looks strangely at Vice who expresses the same body language back at him. Peter panics further and asks him to leave, leaving Peter feeling confused and aggravated. He starts to rummage through his files on seven of his patients and not being able to find the 7^th one as peter has been lost in his work he never realised there was no 7^th patient un till Vice shown up. As he reads each page the words of the sins start to pop out at him and flashbacks begin of the patient’s stories. Instead he sees himself in the flashbacks. As this is happening Peter is narrating throughout. The stress is too much and he leans back in his chair and slowly drifts away. Suddenly the scene cuts and when Peter opens his eyes.  A woman who seems to be his wife is sat there in the room which he knew to be his office. However this is the hypnotist with the face of the wife in her office. She quotes “We are done for today” and Peter does not answer. “I will see you the same time tomorrow” As he walks out of the office we see that Peter is in fact in a mental institute. Each person he walks past has the same face as the people who were in the 7 stories to leave the audience to question almost every aspect: what was real or not?

The main characters in my programme are Peter Virtue/Vice, Vincent’s wife or Hypnotist Susanna Magdalene and the seven patients. Peter Virtue is a man with insomnia lost in his own mind who works as a psychiatrist in his own world with a wife and two daughters.  He has a mental illness where we see him depressed and stressed due to work relations. We see him in two perspectives.  Susanna Magdalene we also see in two perspectives, the loving wife who takes care of her children who struggles to understand her husband and then the character at the end of the series of a hypnotist. We see the seven patients behave in the way of their titled sin and their names also begin with their sin: Levi, Gemma, George, Simon, Whitney, Edward, and Pride for Peter Virtue. Each character shows their Sin in a very extreme manner.