Bequest: An EA-ish TV show that didn’t make it

By Keiran Harris 🔸 @ 2024-11-21T21:11 (+65)

Hey everyone, I’m the producer of The 80,000 Hours Podcast, and a few years ago I interviewed AJ Jacobs on his writing, and experiments, and EA. And I said that my guess was that the best approach to making a high-impact TV show was something like: You make Mad Men — same level of writing, directing, and acting — but instead of Madison Avenue in the 1950-70s, it’s an Open Phil-like org.

So during COVID I wrote a pilot and series outline for a show called Bequest, and I ended up with something like that (in that the characters start an Open Phil-like org by the middle of the season, in a world where EA doesn't exist yet), combined with something like: Breaking Bad, but instead of raising money for his family, Walter White is earning to give. (That’s not especially close to the story, and not claiming it’s anywhere near that quality, but that’s the inspiration!)

My aim was to create a show that’s popular independent of the message, thinking that if folks are super engaged they'll naturally learn about core EA ideas — like how fans of Mad Men can’t help but learn a lot about advertising in the 1960s.

And then in big red letters in my mind I had the warning: “Don’t be preachy, it’s a massive turn-off”. So I decided against exploring core EA ideas until 4 or 5 episodes into a 10-episode show (where in a perfect world it’d end up getting multiple seasons).

Now, actually getting a high-quality TV show made feels close to impossible for any given idea / script, so you’re really just buying a ticket to a raffle. But with Bequest I had a brief glimmer of hope: some impressive folks liked the script and passed it on to industry connections. As far as I know, none of those influential people read it, but the initial interest was promising. I’d also thought that if a TV show seemed unrealistic, maybe I could turn it into a novel instead.

Then FTX imploded — and suddenly a show about a man who’d committed serious crimes and now wanted to donate $1B+ to effective causes seemed a lot less fun and exciting to EAs!

So I shelved it, knowing that even if we could press a button to have Vince Gilligan (the creator of Breaking Bad) make a brilliant version of Bequest for Netflix — there’d be plenty of people in the community who’d vote against that given the SBF scandal. And it’s not the kind of thing anyone should be excited about pushing forward unilaterally.

Anyway, flash forward to today: we’re releasing an 80k podcast episode I hosted with Elizabeth Cox, who founded an independent production company with a ~$2.5M grant from Open Phil. In our conversation, I use Bequest as an example of a totally different approach to doing good via storytelling than the one Elizabeth went with for her new show Ada — so I figured I might as well share the pilot script and the 10-episode outline here for anyone who’d be interested.

[Flagging that the pitch deck / series outline contains massive spoilers for the script — so if you’re up for reading both, I’d recommend starting with the script!]

I’ve lowered my goal slightly since the start of this project, from “make one of the best shows ever!” to “give more than 15 people an entertaining 45-minute read!” — would be great to hear from you if I’m closing in on the new target!

Pilot script link

Pitch deck / series outline link

Email: keiran@80000hours.org