ANTHOLOGY SERIES
MORTAL FOOLS
FORMAT
Anthology Series
GENRE
Drama/Alt-History
RUN TIME
60 Minutes (10)
Series Overview
“Mortal Fools” is an anthology series that examines a version of reality in which a public figure of epochal significance who died prematurely survives their infamous demise. Each season charts a new and extended course for their lives, following them as they (quite literally) find life after death.
Over the course of a single season, the aborted death and continued life of the individual in question will not only play out at the scale of their own lives; it will also play out at the scale of the world at large. They will be seen to alter history in ways subtle and overt, tragic and redemptive, banal and transcendent — and everything in between. For this reason, the subjects chosen for each season must be more than merely famous: their life and death must have operated as a sort of historical fulcrum, subtly but unmistakably (and irreversibly) altering the trajectory of popular culture through their life and work.
If conventional biopics that tend to ask some version of the same two questions (namely, how did this person become notable? and what did it all mean?) then “Mortal Fools” endeavours to ask could this tragic figure have been redeemed? and if so, what then might their legacy have been?
At at its core, “Mortal Fools” is, of course, a show about fame — specifically its contemporary incarnations — and all the ways that the mythology of celebrity is constructed, maintained, and perpetuated in the broader culture: namely, what it means to the individuals experiencing it, and how it shapes our world beyond the confines of the entertainment industry. In a polarised, fragmented, individualist, and largely secular society, celebrities are arguably the last remaining shared mythologies about which we organise ourselves. For better or for worse, they have taken up a place in the collective imagination that was once occupied by religion, folklore, common custom, and the myriad other shared moral and epistemological frameworks that clarified (and constrained) our place in the broader order of things.
But beyond simply interrogating the rites and rituals of modern fame, “Mortal Fools” is also concerned with understanding the broader historical currents that have created the world (which is to say, the version of reality) that we currently inhabit. And by using the non-death of one individual as the catalyst for a subtly bit profoundly shifted version of reality, the supreme fragility and contingency of our own world comes into clearer view.
By forestalling the death of a universally recognisable figure, what we stand to gain is a window onto a world that is still recognisable as our own, but subtly removed from it in ways that are both profound and instructive. And in that difference, in those incongruities, we find an opportunity to contemplate not only what might have been, but also to consider what might still be. Because to posit an alternate version of the past is necessarily to consider an alternate version of the present, and in effect ask: why is the world the way it is?
Season One
Season 1 of “Mortal Fools” focuses on the life and undeath of Kurt Cobain, the legendary front man of Nirvana who took his own life on April 5, 1994, at the age of 27.
He was arguably the last true superstar to emerge before the mass cultural fragmentation and hyper-polarisation that now characterises so much of modern life. His life and his career was representative of and co-incident to the transition between two distinct eras: most of what we now take as the preconditions of modern life —culturally, political, and technologically — had their roots in the 1990s. From social media to smartphones to China’s ascendancy to America’s ongoing self-immolation to political polarisation to cultural fragmentation: the die was cast in the few short years between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the (so-called) War on Terror. Though it didn’t necessarily seem so at the time, the 1990s was a radical decade where nearly everything was being contested and rebuilt: the old world was dying off, and a new one was emerging. In essence, what was at stake were two competing versions of reality: one that was authentic and open but therefore confounding and imperfect, which is to say, real; and one that was manufactured and constrained but therefore seductive and glossy, which is to say, fake. (We needn’t specify which of these two propositions won out in the end).
Kurt is a particularly rich and potent subject precisely because he understood and anticipated and attempted to reject the conditions that would ultimately metastasise into the hyper sensationalised culture that we now live with and in. He refused to submit to the machinations fame industrial complex not only because it was venal and debased and dehumanising and grotesque (which it certainly was, even then), but because it was dumb and fake and utterly meaningless. And to the extent that he ever could be seen enjoying his fame, it was while he was wilfully tearing at the carefully constructed facade that had been built around him, screaming (or rather, mumbling) to the world that the emperor has no clothes.
And while his cultural impact never quite reached the levels of the Beatles or Michael Jackson or (dare we say it) Kim Kardashian, he is nonetheless a complex and fascinating figure with which and through which to explore this brief, fleeting, highly contested moment in time that could have produced a radically different world from the one we now occupy.