Casting Call for Network TV Crime Procedural
Crime on American TV is no funny business
We are looking to audition for the following stock character roles for a network procedural show. Hopefully, it will be syndicated after 2 decades and you stand to make royalties for as long as you live.
- Team Leader:
You will need to be an old white dude. Your background will be in the CIA or Marines/Army or some other mercenary organization run by the United States. You will be unmarried/triple divorced/widower so that you can date a revolving list of other white ladies who prop up during the various seasons. Your larger arc is that of someone who condones law enforcement brutality of all varieties. You are conservative, like CNN: pretending to bat for both sides of the aisle, fiercely and stupidly patriotic while actually being pretty petty in your judgements of crime and criminals. You will have a signature phrase/ Prop: sunglasses, cap, or gun on your ankle. You will be obsessed with something solitary: fishing, boat building, camping. Under no circumstances will you show your true emotions. Stoic. Patriarch.
2. Rookie:
You will be fresh-faced mid-career and the comic relief for the show. There will be many women (of course because you are a cis-gendered white man) that you will flirt with, and make a fool of yourself over, but deep down you are not afraid to show your true self to the show and the woman in question depending on the season. You also have a law enforcement background and despite your appearance and insouciance, have a deep commitment to the pursuit of justice/ law or whatever other delusion you might have. Your props are more banal compared to the team leader let’s say backpack for the pilot. You will have an esoteric choice of the arts: jazz, old Hollywood movies and will regurgitate your encyclopedic knowledge of those at every available opportunity.
3. Nerd:
All genders, welcome! This is the DEI tokenism role. You can be a man, woman, queer person of colour, goth, emo, metal head, on the spectrum. The defining characteristic of your character is a single-minded mentality to do ‘science/ computer stuff/ hacking’. The only ask from the network is that you will have one unique characteristic: Either you drink too much coffee/ sleep in a coffin/ wear really high lifts (if in fact, you are a woman). You can and will be at some point let go from the show (if in fact, you are a woman) to be replaced by another woman who is a person of colour. You might have flirtations with the Geek (whose profile I will list below or the Rookie and the ratings will decide your fate on this show). Oh, the last thing, you will be completely unfiltered and the Team Lead will love you for it and it will show. You will also demonstrate an inhuman capability of speed typing on computers halfway through the season and definitely in the finale.
4. Genius:
You will be a young man (race uncertain) who is unaware of their own genius. You are a person who speaks rapidly and spouts out all kinds of academic finds, intellectual understandings, and historic readings, but you speak in a staccato tone. Translation: You have a mentally or psychiatrically undiagnosed condition which makes you suited for the role in the team, but at some point, in some season, you WILL become the primary suspect in a crime. There will be some childhood trauma thrust on your character: an abusive household, foster care, runaway, to fortify how you overcame all those adversities and got into an Ivy (because, ahem, genius) and dedicated your life to law enforcement and the pursuit of ‘bad guys’. You will have no props: but will be dressed as an assistant professor in all 22 seasons, so that over 22 years, it will seem like you have not aged at all.
5. Eye Candy:
All genders, welcome! You will definitely be a person of colour/ exotic irrespective of gender. You might be a Pacific Islander, Hispanic, Black, or Middle Eastern. Your primary role is to look good, be attractive to everyone on the team, have bad-ass one-liners (comparable to the team leader) and have a lovable history. You will occasionally tell the team anecdotes of your years growing up: Hawaii, Mexico, Atlanta, Syria. Then there will be a moment when all your joy, your love, and your family went through a crisis because a local insurgent group/ drug cartel/street hustler/ religious terrorist took it all away. And that is how you decided to join law enforcement instead of your dream of becoming a healthcare provider, a professional sportsperson, an artist, or a peace ambassador (the last two references and their anecdotes will be truly vomit-worthy). Then after topping your class at Quantico, you decided you wanted to do more than arrest thugs on the corner and be part of a bigger mission to nip crime in the bud.
6. Muse:
You will be a white lady/ occasionally brown but in that case always from outside the continental US/ from Colombia or a small island in the Caribbean, who comes and goes out of episodes and seasons. You will have some romantic history with the Team Leader, but now you are in an investigation where his team and yours have to butt heads. There will be palpable chemistry when you visit the Team Leader after hours and are still both amused and infatuated that he still drinks bourbon neat in ball mason jars, after emptying the various screws and bolts out of them in his workshop/man cave/ garage. You will always think of him as the one who got away. You are the one who breathes humanity and emotion into the stoic, conservative, patriarch. You are similar in age to the Team Leader, but you are so much more attractive, as is your job as a woman. You have never been married or are widowed, but never divorced. You have a child who resents you because you have never told them who their father is. Depending on the season you debut in, and the ratings, you don’t know how many episodes you will feature in, or if the writers will give you a larger arc through multiple seasons, but you do know one thing for sure: you WILL die a gruesome death at some point.
