Writing

Max Everdrive

Summary

  • Title: Max Everdrive
  • Logline: A depressed talking dog, his only friends a sentient ball of grease and a broken AI, searches for a new home after the destruction of Earth.
  • Written by: Rob Welch
  • Format: 6 x 30′ episodic sitcom
  • Genre: comedy/drama/sci-fi

It is the near-future. All of the great sci-fi authors of the 20th century, and Robert A. Heinlein, were wrong. The world has been ravaged by a deadly plague, created by scientists searching for a cure to male pattern baldness. In our darkest hour, humans broadcast a desperate message into deep space. It simply read:

HELP US
IF THERE’S ANYONE OUT THERE, PLEASE, HELP US
WE’RE AFRAID

To our surprise, someone heard. Someone came to help. Aliens made contact, and were able to relocate the surviving earth population to nearby planets. All except one – an anthropomorphic talking dog, named Dog. He’s too depressed to get out of bed, let alone apply for off-world citizenship. Trapped on a space station formerly used as a staging area for human refugees, all he can do is kill time and hope for his situation to improve. Dog’s only friends are Merrick, a befuddled alien obsessed with Earth culture, and Zoltran, a malfunctioning Artificial Intelligence. They mean well, but they can’t help him – then again, who caIt is the near-future. All of the great sci-fi authors of the 20th century, and Robert A. Heinlein, were wrong. The world has been ravaged by a deadly plague, created by scientists searching for a cure to male pattern baldness. In our darkest hour, humans broadcast a desperate message into deep space. It simply read:n?

What is this show about?

  • Decades of pop-culture esoterica – the show’s alien characters attempt to unpick the entire history of the human race from advertisements, newspaper cartoons and dirty magazines.
  • The COVID-19 pandemic – the scripts were written in the early stages of the pandemic (around April-May 2020), and try to capture the feeling of the time – anxiety, social isolation, alienation, claustrophobia, and how the apocalyptic quickly becomes mundane.
  • Hauntology – visions of the future, delivered from the past, that never came true. As Dog struggles with depression, addiction and PTSD, he must also learn to accept that the future he expected will never come true.

Downloads

You can download scripts for every episode in PDF format. Max Everdrive by Rob Welch is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

You can also download the pitch document here.

More stuff

I might update this page with drawings or other Max Everdrive stuff later – I had at one point planned to actually animate the show using some kind of limited animation, maybe in Source Filmmaker or Blender, but it proved to be too much work and well outside my regular wheelhouse. In addition to these scripts, I also wrote a bunch of incidental music for the show, which I released in an album called The Sound of Max Everdrive.


Last updated November 15, 2022.

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