The Wednesday Play – The Realm of Never: Moratorium (2001)

23 October 2013 Rob Buckley The Weekly Play, US TV Post a comment

To a large extent, modern television has turned its back on the play, both here and the US. Does that mean the play is dead? 

Not at all. Public access television in the US, for example, has enabled amateurs and semi-professionals to create their own plays and broadcast them to the masses, and YouTube and Vimeo allow others to do the same. The Realm of Never was a series of plays produced between 1999 and 2008 at Queens Public Television in Flushing, New York. The plays were designed to mimic the likes of Playhouse 90 in look and feel, right down to being videotaped,. Cheap they may have been, but that’s the beauty of the play – it doesn’t matter so much about the budget so much as the performances and end result

Each of the plays had a supernatural theme aimed at exploring the human condition. The 2001 episode, Moratorium, wonders what would happen if a virus were unleashed that had a very interesting side-effect: omniscience. And it’s this week’s Wednesday Play – enjoy!

 

Author

  • Rob Buckley

    I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.

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