Throw Out Your TV

There might have been aliens in that pizza.

Surfing around Netflix, we stumbled on a list called the "Top 10 in the US." Number 1 was something called "Manifest," which we had never heard of despite its being around since 2018. Being out of the loop and wanting to get in, my husband and I decided to watch the show.

The pilot was great. Very compelling. We watched the second episode. The next night we watched the third and the fourth. By the end of the fourth episode we started to get a bad feeling, something along the lines of "this sucks, makes no sense, is really dumb and will only get dumber the longer we watch it."

It seems that these days, anything goes with writers of TV shows. They must be on some crazy drugs and lots of Gatorade to come up with the stuff they do. I decided I could write one of those shows, even without the drugs and the Gatorade, if I put my mind to it and lacked enough sleep. Here's one idea I've come up with:

The Aliens Inside Us

Pilot: Are You What You Eat?

A dozen brown eggs and a huge head of iceberg lettuce take control of everything inside a Kitchen-Aid refrigerator in a seemingly typical suburban home in Los Angeles. The army of condiments lined up on the door of the refrigerator want desperately to fight back, but they are constrained by the very shelf in which they sit. Chaos ensues. The man of the house opens the fridge and grabs a beer. All is quiet inside.

Episode 2: The Cherries Unite

A bag full of cherries plots revenge. One by one they steal out of their plastic bag and surround the sleeping bag of lettuce. Just then, the refrigerator door opens and the teenage boy who lives in the house, who is actually a CIA agent working on The Living Foods Project, a joint program of the United States and Russia aimed at determining if aliens have invaded the Earth's food supply and ultimately the bodies of humans, which would explain why so many people are so crazy, grabs the bag of cherries and goes away with them.

Episode 3: Questionable Hot Dogs

The mother who rules the roost looks in the fridge and sees that a sealed bag of hot dogs has been compromised. She questions all of her children: One them hears voices and cuts herself to make them stop. Another has an incurable, unnamed disease. A third is morbidly obese and thus is often poking around inside the fridge. The fourth, a daughter, has bulimia and confesses that she opened the bag and was going to eat the hot dogs raw but then heard someone coming and ran away.

And more like that. What do you think? Would you watch it? And by the way, if you think this sounds ridiculous, try a few episodes of "Manifest" and get back to me.