GENIUS: Kids in Brooklyn solve mysteries.
PBS SUITS: Cute.
GENIUS: A ghost helps them.
SUIT #1: Spooky.
GENIUS: It is not meant as such. Crime is the threat. Ghostwriter is an ally.
SUIT #2: So, a friendly ghost. Like Casper?
GENIUS: Casper is the grinning shade of a child. Boisterous, needy — he would be of no practical use on a crime-solving squad. Ghostwriter’s story is much darker.
SUIT #1: Is this like demons? We don’t want the faith-based orgs jumping down our throats.
GENIUS: He isn’t a Ouija board, Linda. Ghostwriter is here to solve crimes, not create drama.
When he lived, Roger H. Twist was a slave who taught other slaves to read, a perilous act of defiance. He escaped during the Civil War…
[collective sigh of relief]
GENIUS: …Only to be caught and killed by slave catchers and their dogs.
[…]
SUIT #2: Oh.
SUIT #1: Does the show…um, show this?
GENIUS: Not explicitly, no. But I’m sure most viewers will pick up on it after an episode or two.
SUIT #3: And Roger H. Twist…
GENIUS: Yes, it’s an anagram of Ghostwriter. Did I explain that Ghostwriter communicates mainly in anagrams?
He manipulates letters of text in books, newspapers, what have you, to form clues that help the youths solve mysteries. Ghostwriter can summon any nearby letters for his messages, and unlike traditional anagrams, they glow. Ghostwriter’s abilities transcend anagrammar. Most likely because he is a ghost.
SUIT #3: What does he look like?
GENIUS: Kind of like a feed icon.
[???]
GENIUS: Just a general web-logo kind of look. He can change color and like, whiz from word to word. There’s a sound. It’s very hip and dot-com.
[murmurs of approval]
SUIT #2: Sounds nifty, but… That’s not very ghostly, is it? Shouldn’t he be translucent, or have an eerie pallor or something?
GENIUS: You have to understand that his identity as a writer is more important than his condition as a ghost. There’s no spectral moaning or rattling of windowpanes. In fact, Ghostwriter is only able to communicate through the written word. The kids must write to him in order to be understood.
SUIT #1: Learning, that’s lovely. Tell us about these kids.
GENIUS: They attend Zora Neale Hurston Middle School and Washington Elementary. Jamal is the first to commune with our literate spirit. He is Twist’s descendant, and his father, Samuel L. Jackson, gives him the book that releases Ghostwriter’s soul.
The next to see is Lenni. She’s the kind of rapping eleven-year-old hippie who embodies the last days of the millennium.
SUIT #2: They’re animated? Claymation? Puppet? Muppet?
GENIUS: They are flesh and blood. How else would a story with a ghost make sense?
We also have Gaby Fernández, who is the tough and lively avatar of little sisters everywhere. In fact she is so ubiquitous and quintessential that if you had to replace Gaby with another Gaby mid-series, nobody would even notice. Or everyone would. One of those two things.
SUIT #2: Wait, what now?
GENIUS: And Gaby’s older brother, Alex, who’s a total fox. This will eventually be apparent to Tina Nguyen, child journalist and documentarian. I envision a role for one of Jamal’s female cousins, too. It just seems that, in the future of TV, ensembles without multiple young women of color will no longer be relevant.
SUIT #3: Ethnic diversity is neat!
[nobody looks at Carl]
GENIUS: We might add a token white male, maybe a poet in frequent need of rescue, but I don’t know. Guess it depends on Ghostwriter; he chooses who sees him.
SUIT #2: Given that a ghostwriter is an uncredited author for work attributed to someone else, won’t the viewing public be a tad confused?
GENIUS: [gently] No. No, I don’t think the children watching this will confuse Ghostwriter, a lettered phantom who fights crime, with whoever wrote Profiles in Courage.
SUIT #1: And what kind of “crimes” does he solve, exactly? Carmen San Diego already has geographical heists covered.
GENIUS: Anything that would fall under the jurisdiction of Ghostwriter and a diverse team of Brooklyn youngsters. So, for example, Alex is running for class president but someone is conducting a smear campaign against him in the halls of the school…
[relaxed chuckles]
SUIT #3: Oh, okay. So by “crimes” we mean like, schoolyard scrapes. That sort of mischief.
GENIUS: Yes. Also arson, stalking, drugs, gang violence, rare bird smuggling, and time travel. Jamal will be framed. Gaby will be poisoned by toxic waste. The group will be nearly rent apart when a car accident seeds discord among their parents, but chasing down an art thief will restore unity. Craig will disappear forever and never be spoken of again.
SUIT #3: Who’s Craig?
GENIUS: Indeed.
SUIT #1: And they solve these cases through…anagrams.
GENIUS: The purpose of this show is to instruct young viewers in two things: literacy, and delayed gratification.
SUIT #3: Why delayed gratification?
[The GENIUS waits a long time before she answers, and everyone agrees Carl walked right into that one]
GENIUS: Each Ghostwriter mystery will be part of a serialized arc that spans four or five episodes. Kids will have to watch every episode in order to find out whodunit. Pretty much the only way they’ll be able to see the resolution is during teacher strikes, which will instill in them a lifelong appreciation for robust labor unions.
SUIT #1: Always something we’re looking for.
SUIT #3: Mm.
GENIUS: Ghostwriter rewards the patient, the loyal, the attentive. If that means some fans will reach adulthood without ever learning who Max Mouse is, so be it.
SUIT #2: Here’s my concern: Is this visually interesting? On a dramatic level? Watching kids write…and a ghost make words glow…like, it just seems that a ghost might have more interesting powers than making words glow.
GENIUS: [shaking her head with pity] The audience is no passive spectator, Mitch. It’s interactive. Kids will track the mysteries with their very own Ghostwriter casebooks, which they will definitely all get and keep for longer than a day. We also hope it will inspire them to learn touch-typing, as watching middle-schoolers poke a keyboard is torture.
SUIT #1: The situations you’ve described sound pretty intense. Maybe we can try to keep it light? Little kids will be watching; no need to expose them to gang violence and the like.
GENIUS: It is interesting to me the way adults speak of “protecting” children.
[A calm sip of water. Everyone waits.]
[…and waits]
GENIUS: Doesn’t this very network proclaim that “knowledge is power?” And who are more powerless than children? “Expose them”? They are already exposed.
SUIT #2: Right, but. Arson. Stalking. Slavecatchers. Isn’t it a little much?
GENIUS: The world is not safer if you close your eyes to its darkness and its dangers. When we shield children from the truths of the world they share with us, we are taking away one of the only kinds of power to which they can lay claim. Ghostwriter gave his life to empower others with knowledge.
[Long silence. Nobody wants to be the first to dishonor Ghostwriter’s sacrifice.]
GENIUS: This is a transformational coming-of-age narrative. That’s why Ghostwriter is of course an anagram of “Growth Rites.”
SUIT #1: Look, educational mysteries are definitely our jam here at PBS. But we’re wading into murky spiritual waters here. The ghost stuff, concepts of the afterlife and the soul…. Does Ghostwriter have a mission? Is he in Purgatory? Can the show avoid these questions?
GENIUS: The series never delineates a theological perspective. No one speaks of heaven or hell or the soul. The show’s spiritual philosophy is obvious enough from context.
[???]
GENIUS: Words are souls.
[SUITS poise their pencils over their caseboo—sorry, notepads. They wait.]
GENIUS: They are ourselves, extracted from our bodies, and they live forever.
SUIT #2: I see.
[Not as the GENIUS sees. She speaks almost as if the words are being revealed to her in ready form by a sentient light. SUITS wait.]
GENIUS: After death we speak through words. It is the only way — but a potent way. Words live. They are real things in the world, and readers are not a passive audience, they are champions who take these words, our clues and promises, and with them shape the world. It is this, more than anything else, that Ghostwriter illuminates.
[She leans toward them, and it is as though her words begin to glow]
GENIUS: Words can touch you — physically alter your body — raise hairs at the nape, hollow the gut, send shivers shoulder to toe — and does this not change our understanding of presence and absence?
[SUITS look to each other. To the words of their notes. They see the other words their words can form, and other faces fill the room. Everyone is here, together, now. Words, they realize, are the salve of loss.]
GENIUS: I have written these things and you have read them, you have felt my touch, and there is no distance between us at all.
YESSSSSSSSSSSS
*Alex totally is a fox. I remember almost no details about this show, but I remember that Alex is a fox.
*I found out the whole Ghostwriter/slave thing from one of the novelizations, and would not have known otherwise.
Anyway, like usual, Abbey has made me want to do nothing other than bingewatch the shows of my childhood for the rest of the week.
It feels like the Ghost of my childhood has just reached forward and handed me back my pen necklace.
THIS IS GENIUS
good golly I thought the Animaniacs pitch would be the peak of the nascent “poke fun at flaws of an old show while building to unexpectedly profound life truths” genre, but here we are!
edit: seems I’ve missed some entries in this series jeeeeeez I got to go play catch up LATERRR
Holy crap, this is amazing.
I still care more about the Tina/Alex ship more than anything Harry Potter has to offer. It was a bit one-sided when they were younger; it took many years for Tina to come around. They still live in New York, their kids love their aunt Gaby, Alex stays home and writes detective novels, Tina never misses Sundance.
*sheds a single tear of joy*
This made me bizarrely emotional, why am I tearing up over 3 sentences of Ghostwriter fanfic?
What a heyday for the merch group at PBS. Toys? Action figures? Race cars?
NO! Necklace pens and notebooks!
Ahhhh. I just vocalized incoherently at those last lines.
And now that I have told you this, there is no distance between us at all.
ahhhhhh
I feel like I need to lie down now. Preferably under a waterfall, so I can complete whatever journey was just started and achieve perfect writing enlightenment
Abbey. Abbey, Abbey, Abbey. You are truly a genius and a national treasure and thank you for picking all the shows I watched in rapture and writing these amazing pitch meetings. i loved Ghostwriter so much. I played so much Ghost with my siblings and later with my husband when we were bored in class. I may owe my whole marriage to Ghostwriter. I still have my pen necklace. Your hashtag game is on point.
GENIUS: The purpose of this show is to instruct young viewers in two things: literacy, and delayed gratification.
SUIT #3: Why delayed gratification?
[The GENIUS waits a long time before she answers, and everyone agrees Carl walked right into that one]
This was bizarrely inspirational.
unless you’re Carl, maybe.
How did I know that Ghostwriter was the ghost of a slave? I guess it must have been through the novelizations, but I feel as though I ALWAYS knew it.
What I did NOT know, which I just learned from looking it up, is that the child actor who played Jamal was named Sheldon Turnipseed, and has there ever been a more fitting name for a person?
Is he actually a character in that episode from the 20s? Because Sheldon Turnipseed would be a character from that episode.
And while I was confirming the time period, I read the wikipedia story synopses. Man, I’d forgotten how hardcore this show was.
It was so great. And looking back at pictures of the cast, I have two questions for myself:
1. How did I think that Lennie was so well-dressed?
2. How did I ever believe that that boy was named anything BUT Sheldon Turnipseed?
Every day I think “this thing here is what I will miss about the Toast” but maybe all the quality Ghostwriter content is what I will actually miss most about the Toast? It inspired me to watch the show again (thanks youtube!) and brought back great memories of what was really pretty quality entertainment all things considered. It gave kids a lot of credit for what they could handle but was still a lot of fun.
The Max Mouse episode though, it scared me so much as a child (yeah not the slime monster, max mouse) and I am not sure why or how that happened.
OK, am I making up that once there was a contest where you could write a concept for an episode of Ghostwriter and they would maybe…make it? Send you a casebook? Something? Because I clearly remember trying to write what was essentially Ghostwriter fan fic and I thought it was for a purpose but maybe just for my own personal love of Ghostwriter.
No, I’m pretty sure you could do that and join the Ghostwriter’s Mystery Club or something. I know I had a composition notebook with a GW sticker on the front, and I think they put up a P.O. Box address at the end of each episode where you could send fanmail and also episode concepts.
omgggggg Tina Nguyen! I think she was the first normal Viet Am girl I Saw on TV. (Trini, the Yellow Ranger, doesn’t entirely account because you know, fighting monsters.)
now that I think about it, I’m SURE Alex’s crush on Tina was the first time I saw an Asian American girl depicted as the object of a crush, and that probably mattered to me at the time.
Also! I think this is def the first time I saw an interracial POC romantic pairing. I think the second one was California Dreams. Ahhh 90s TV.
ETA: Nope, the first time I saw that was the movie The Golden Child. However, this is prob the first time I’ve seen an Asian or Asian American character being the subject of a crush while not being a fetishized stereotype. Huh, that sounds like a very narrow category but it shouldn’t be.
oh my god, that is ALSO why I watched California Dreams, I’m convinced of it.
I think it got me when Sam (the Chinese exchange student) was first introduced. I remember that there was this little bit when the other characters has assumed she didn’t speak English and she was basically like “I learned English in my school in Hong Kong, WTF is wrong with you.” That bit of dialogue got me watching the show.
Well now I have to go watch this and all of the other TNBC things.
In case anyone else is wondering what the Ghostwriter cast is doing, and missed this article when it came out: https://www.buzzfeed.com/inarelationshipwithpizza…
That bit about Hector’s actor’s parents disowning him because he’s gay… 🙁
Ahh! I skimmed over that. 🙁 That’s such a terrible thing to do to your child..
there is no distance between us at all
WAUGH
Not Evelyn Waugh, though (that banana-stealing bastard)
Poor Carl.
except gooey gus. we will not speak of gooey gus.
SO SCARY.
DID YOU KNOW THAT IT’S MY BIRTHDAY THANK YOU FOR MY BIRTHDAY PRESENT.
Ghostwriter, which was only on during Sunday mornings when I was usually at church, unless I was sick, gave me a love of writing with a good pen.
Those kids always had really nice pens.
I LOVED THIS SHOW. Why are there not shows like this for kids anymore? I have the first season on DVD and it holds up. Although one thing I noticed upon rewatch: the police really suck. They let people waltz in and mess up their crime scene and I have no idea how the kids solved some of these crimes before they did, even with Ghostwriter.
Rob from Ghostwriter was my first crush, ever. And what the hell did happen to Craig?
We do not speak of Craig. Where he has gone, none may follow.
Somewhere on fanfiction.net is a pretty decent fic wherein the team — including those who could see Ghostwriter but made only brief appearances — reunites to help GW solve the mystery of himself, as it were. I forget the title, though.
In other news, let us never speak of Gaby 2.0.
I remember this!
HOLY SHIT.
Abbey Fenbert, your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Oh God. Oh my God. This is perfect. Thank you
I didn’t realize a THE PITCH FOR piece could make me cry as well as laugh out loud, but here we are.
I never did see the resolution of the time-travel plot…
There is no resolution of the time travel plot. We are all still traveling through time
I was not expecting to finish this post wanting to cry, but here we are.
Seconding this.
THIS HAS CHANGED ME.
(Also, “unlike traditional anagrams, they glow” was *italian chef finger kiss move*)
This is fantastic.
Oh I never really watched this show but now I wished I did! This was delightful.
Same! I think I might have seen collectively 2.5 minutes of the show while at friends’ houses/while my baby brother was watching Reading Rainbow, because it rings the tiniest of bells. But this is making me wish I had seen the whole thing.
In fact she is so ubiquitous and quintessential that if you had to replace Gaby with another Gaby mid-series, nobody would even notice. Or everyone would. One of those two things.
This may have been an early lesson for me about betrayal. Or I may totally have accepted it and moved on. One of those two things.
I mean, probably the first thing, but let’s all pretend that I was a child capable of coping with change.
I guess this is the younger generation’s Becky from “Roseanne”.
I resent being “the younger generation.” I was also upset about The Two Darrens.
Dick York was far superior, that’s for sure
I also like to consider myself ‘hip and dot-com’.
The bird smuggling plot! MADE ME VERY UPSET. I remember that Ranger RIck was also addressing the issue at the same time and I couldn’t stand the thought of poor smuggled animals. Still can’t. I think the punishment should be shoving someone into a pants leg, and packing them in a suitcase and leaving them on a hot tampa tarmac for at least 30 hours.
And all I remember is someone wore a birdcage under a dress to look pregnant in that episode.
Do you folks remember the episode where Rob and That Veteran’s Daughter got trapped in that old subway tunnel?!?! Or the one with the girl from Mozambique who ran away from home after an argument with her jerky dad and got trapped in that random basement room?? THERE WAS A LOT OF GETTING TRAPPED ON THIS SHOW AND IT SCARED LITTLE ME SO MUCH. Nonetheless, favorite childhood show ever. This is gold.
I was just about to mention the subway tunnel one. I’m remembering them being really screwed because they had nothing to write with until they figured out they could use pebbles.
*barely audible whispered scream*
I had a pen necklace, but I think I bought it at Claire’s???? I also wrote that Ghostwriter was my favorite TV show in my seventh-grade “getting to know you” survey, which was probably one year too old for that. (To be fair, it was the FIRST DAY of seventh grade.)
This has been one of my absolutely favourite series on the Toast (even though I don’t think I have watched any of the things whose pitches are described. I always feel like I must have watched Ghostwriter, but then I read a plot synopsis and it is completely alien to me).
Tell us about these kids.
They appear to have a real fondness for hats.
My sister spearheaded a letter writing campaign to PBS to get them to stop airing the same Ghostwriter episode for a week before airing the next one, by which I mean she dictated a letter to my brother and me and forced us to end it with “P.S. All our friends feel the same way.” I did not want to because we had no friends who felt any way at all about Ghostwriter, as far as I knew, so this was A LIE.
Even with the combined weight of the opinions of my brother and sister and our fake friends, PBS continued to frustratingly air the same damn episode every weekday afternoon long after we became sick of it.
That painstakingly slow but neat handwriting though. I had real love-hate relationship with that. So neat! But so slow! ~Conflicted~
Ahh! I skimmed over that. 🙁 That's such a terrible thing to do to your child..
What I remember about Ghostwriter was watching it dubbed in Colombia and how they had to mash “FANTASMA ESCRITOR” into the theme song. Also I have no recollection of how they managed to translate it at all.
Also as a Latina nicknamed Gaby I always pointed at Ghostwriter when people quibbled my nickname spelling (“no, it doesn’t rhyme with baby.”). I don’t remember much about it otherwise