November 23, 2001

Hello all!  Well, I'm still not giving up on the qs9300 project and I hope you're not either.  we're coming up to our final five episodes in January (sob!) but until then we're faced with re-runs and movies!  Bah!  You deserve better!  You need content!

So with that I present what i consider the 'lost episode' of season one.  It's something that I wrote as a 'spec' script but never got completely around to giving to them.  Let me relate to you sad ballad of 'Kim E. Oldman'...

Around about the time the show had been picked up after the pilot, I still didn't have a clue as to Eberts' ultimate fate.  Matt had assured me that he wanted me in the show, but promises in this business are worth the gum on the bottom of your shoe (e.g. the producers telling me we're locked in for a third season).  Because i really liked the project I wanted desperately to work on it in some way.  I decided to try to write a script for this fledgling show.

Now I didn't take this lightly.  I am usually very hard on myself and my evaluation of my skills.  If I ever sense that I'm 'spinning my wheels' at anything I don't continue that line of work much longer.  If I had ever hit a real brick wall in acting and didn't think I had the talent to overcome it, you wouldn't have any idea who Mike McCafferty was.  However, having written several award winning plays in college and having received very positive feedback from industry people on previous scripts I figured I had nothing to lose.

With that in my I wrote three 'treatments', story ideas for the show.  I was polishing them when Matt suddenly flew the coop and was replaced by the much less approachable David Levinson.  Not really wanting to rock the boat too much by handing him some story ideas, I decided to have an agent submit them under a 'pen name'.  This way if he loved them it would be impartial and if he hated them it would be anonymous.  My agent submitted the scripts under the name Kim E. Oldman: Kim E. is and anagram for 'Mike' and 'Oldman' is my wife's name translated from German.  The perfect crime.

To my surprise, David liked the ideas.  He did figure out that someone on the inside had to have written these as the show hadn't aired yet but the scripts were fitted perfectly to the characters.  After some discussion, we let him know who was the writer.  So far so good.  

The bad news came when I read episode 10 of I-man about three weeks later.  My best story idea was about Darien suffering from a split personality that takes over when he sleeps.  Sound familiar?  My heart sank when I read "The Other Invisible Man".  While there were subtle differences, the stories were so close that mine could never be done.  Movies often come out with the same theme (volcanoes, meteors) but you can't do that on a T.V. series.  As a parting gift, Craig told me that he read my stories and thought that they were the closest to what the show needed.  

So I hunkered down and continued to simply act in the show.  Still, I wasn't satisfied.  I began to call David and ask him about the other ideas I had pitched to him.  Finally he took a call and related that he was indeed interested in one of the story ideas and might buy it from me.  I was elated that I was back in the running.  

Rather than wait for him, I decided to take the initiative.  I toiled away for a few weeks and after several polishes I finished "GL, HF".  I held off on submitting it until after the season was finished.  When I finally decided I was ready to submit it, 'Bad Chi' came out and sort of addressed it.  I asked Jonathan if I could pitch them some story ideas and he replied "Maybe in Season 3".  So much for that promise.

So with all that in mind, I decided to put this effort to some use.  I consider this to be as much a part of the show as any of the episodes.  If we were going to have a season three I would have demanded that I write an episode so this might as well be it.  It's a fun story, there's not that much at stake but it's a romp that a series like ours needed from time to time.  They always say write about what you know and so I did.  

I hope you like this little offering...