ComedyCrowdTV

MAX BARBER

London

What's it all about

The Fathering Kind

We propose to create a series of scenes and sketches to introduce the world, characters and themes of our proposed comedy series, The Fathering Kind.

The Fathering Kind would be a comedy-drama aimed at youth-skewed audience. The story would follow an orphaned disabled girl, Sam Grimes (played by Samantha Renke) who seeks fame in order to attract and find her long-lost family. Although when that notoriety and family does present itself, her world becomes a muddle of greed, mistrust and emotional anarchy stirred up by a whirlwind of tabloid press and manipulated social media. At the heart of the story, The Fathering Kind is about a young woman merely wanting to reconnect with her estranged father – but has to navigate the bizarre, ruthless and shallow world of show-biz in order to do so.

Samantha would play the role close to her real self, and in a reflection of the world the characters - and us in our modern interconnected world - now live in, the narrative storylines would be punctuated, polarized and interwoven with pod-casts, news reports, vloggers comments, twitter feeds, Facebook posts, movie trailers & TV spots – all relating to the media circus that surrounds the main character of super-star, Sam Grimes.

This is a project not just to push the diversity agenda, it is also a vehicle to boost the visablity, and accelerate the career of its rising star, Samantha, who has been on our TV screens for some time as a disability campaigner & influencer. But along the way, we would like to shine a spotlight on the whole push for ‘diversity targets in the media’ – make irony and poke a bit of fun at it.

Samantha recreated the infamous When Harry Met Sally orgasm scene with Rick Edwards for Channel 4’s ‘Is British Drama Faking it?’ campaign. She has also made numerous reports and appearances on Channel 4, BBC & ITV News, Loose Women, The Jeremy Vine Show and was part of the Malteasers add campaign during the 2014 Paralympics.

The idea for The Fathering Kind came about after Samantha, and her collaborator, writer-director, Max Barber, started making spoof spin-off webisodes to promote the micro-budget feature film they made together, Little Devil, which was loosely based on elements from both of their lives.

Little Devil, which won multiple awards at the 2014 Los Angles Diversity Film Festival, was Samantha’s debut film role as an actress, and Max’s first feature beyond his string of LGBT shorts that had proved popular on the film festival circuit. littledevilfilm.com

Their film was a comedy-drama about a broody disabled girl, played by Samantha, who absconds to London to find love and opportunity, but ends up peddling drugs to fund IVF treatment to have a baby, while forming an unorthodox relationship with a washed-up gay, male escort - how might make the ideal father. littledevilfilm.com

You can see the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD_IhuJ1vak

Using very limited means and resources, Samantha and Max quickly turned out the spin-off webisodes to create a buzz about the film on social media. They created fictional behind the scenes charting Samantha’s rise to fame after the film was made to parody the crazy characters and underhand politics that accompany show business when success comes calling. Episode 2 is part of our application link.

You can see all of them on a compiled Youtube playlist here:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBLmJ1iGYtqcKjYRdxs3yeKQ6uXpnD3AH

The thing is, as Samantha & Max started to get more involved with the real business of film, TV, press and social media – they realized that sometimes the truth was becoming stranger than the fiction they created! A recent example - which we’d like to dramatize as one of our Comedy Blaps scenes - were vicious comments from Internet trolls about Sam’s Malteasers TV add which led to her responding to them via her column on The Huffington Post.

You can read it here: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/samantha-renke/malteasers-advert-anti-bullying-month_b_12911978.html

Like with their film, Little Devil, Samantha & Max started taking some of their real-life observations, and weaved them into a heartfelt narrative about an orphaned girl embroiled in an emotional journey to reconnect with the flaky family that abandoned her in the first place. The result was a concept, theme and setting that is, The Fathering Kind.

Before we embark on an intense and extended period of script development for the six-part series, we would like to build our social media reach and engage with platforms to help promote and distribute the up-and-coming series.

Genre

Sitcom

Published

1 Video

There are no updates `

Funding Progress

Goal £20,000

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Writer / Director - Max Barber
www.clevermax.co.uk

Writer / Lead actress - Samantha Renke
www.andrewroachtalent.com/samantha-renke

You can send us a Direct Message with the "Message" button above, and click the follow button to keep up to date with this project.

We are always open to working with new talent who share our vision & naughty sense of humour and want to push diversity targets above and beyond what is expected.