Anna Yamamoto – 2024 Pilot Script Finalist
Flatlands
100 years in the future, a co-worker’s suspicious suicide ignites bumbling New York Times journalist Turner Flats to investigate a dangerous corruption scheme so powerful, it goes all the way to another dimension.
As a mixed-race, queer person, I live my life in the overlap. My sliver of the Venn diagram keeps me code-switching, camouflaging, and in no circle am I at the center. However, despite a world that often feels set on making me even smaller, I choose to believe in magic. Cosmic mysteries yet to be uncovered. Truth beyond what meets the eye. Like that idiot Pandora, I guess I still have hope.
FLATLANDS was adapted from a novella by Edwin Abbott Abbott published in 1884. Abbott’s story, told from the perspective of a square living in a two-dimensional world, was a satirical stab at the hierarchy of Victorian culture. Yet, it simultaneously presented a thought experiment on the possibility of higher dimensions to later be referenced by Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking.
Like the source material, my half-hour dystopian comedy overlaps cultural critique and cosmic wonder. FLATLANDS sifts through New York City amidst the humdrum of climate change, maddening sociopolitical corruption, and tech’s hypnotic swing between advancement and obsolescence. Laughing in the face of this filth, my series asks: But there’s hope, right?
I am a writer who tells stories that reflect ruthless worlds in which sincere characters can still grow. I want to challenge genre conventions, television format, and attack oppressive systems. Also, I’m a multimedia artist, animator, painter, printmaker, graphic designer, and musician who graduated from Loyola Marymount University with an MFA in Writing and Producing for Television in 2023.
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