Just imagine the pitch meeting...Remember Wishbone? What? You don't! It won a Peabody Award!
I'll help you out. Wishbone aired on PBS after Arthur (a show about a sexually-closeted young Ardavark, near as I could tell) and before all that other crap on PBS nobody ever watches. The title character was a Jack Russell Terrier, who had apparently received a classical education somewhere along the way, and his young master, a teenage boy named Joe. Every episode had a parallel narrative, one that took place in the "real" world and one that took place in Wishbone's imagination. Joe would get into some sort of trouble, then Wishbone would imagine himself as a character with a similar dilemma in classical literature. When Wishbone was remembering these canonical works (how did his little claws turn the pages?), he would be able to speak, the rest of the cast refused to acknowledge he was a dog, and they put him in period costume. Christ, I love PBS sometimes.
So Joe would get falsely accused of cheating on a test in school or something and Wishbone would spend the rest of the episode playing Sydney Carnet from a Tale of Two Cities (the little-doggie guillotine they built for him was adorable!). Every episode was a different book: a different, really-weird book. I mean, they did friggin' Faust, but somehow overlooked White Fang....
Wishbone obviously came from noble impulses, but those impulses just as obviously went unfulfilled. Sure, my friends and I watched it religiously to laugh at a dog dressed as Sancho Panza, but we didn't sprint to a library afterward. I'd bet money no child has ever said, "Mommy! PLEEEEEAAAAASSSSSSSEEEEEE by me a copy of Candide! The doggie was so cute as Dr. Pangloss!"
But the problem was in execution, not concept.
I propose fusing the classical focus of Wishbone with the plot device of Quantum Leap. The show will be called "Are You Still Bored?" and will focus on a maniacal high school English teacher and his victim...er, student. When little Timmy misbehaves in class, the teacher hits a button on his magic fiction time machine. Timmy is suddenly transported to the "magical" world of literature, where he can spend the rest of the episode reveling in the joys of necrophilia as Quasimodo, or gouging out his eyes as Oedipus, or strangling his wife to death in Othello.
In fact, let's just keep the focus on Timmy. We'll spend an entire season of bouncing him around literature's greatest atrocities with his English teacher occasionally popping in to mock him with informative lectures (maybe he could even smoke a cigar like Dean Stockwell). And finally, in the season finale, we'll return the broken shell of a man that was once Timmy to the halls of high school, his haunted eyes telling the story of a hundred horrific deaths and an awareness of what human flesh tastes like. However, everyone else will have learned some valuable lessons, and they'll be motivated (by FEAR) to learn more about the world of Literature.
Season Two: Cindy Lou is caught texting in class.
I work cheap and the pilot is already written. Contact my agent.
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