Ted Botha

The decision to put minorities in TV series where there once weren't any is inspired, to say the least. Which is why I'd like to bring to your attention several ideas I've been working on that would give you the chance to use even more of them. (And if the subject of majorities ever comes up, I've got some neat suggestions on how to increase the presence of Irish-Americans.)

The first pro-minority series I call Alice in El Barrio. A teenage girl - think Felicity without the perm and the boy problems - comes to New York City from Idaho to study at Pratt. She discovers a whole new world (and plantains) when she mistakenly gets out of the MetroNorth train at 125 th Street. Alice, a real cutey without a biased hair on her blond head, meets only black people and grocery store owners who speak solamente Spanish. Just when she thinks she's in the Caribbean, she discovers it's only East Harlem.

The pay-off for the network? Everyone's a minority except the lead, who could easily be changed into a Native American if the N.A.A.C.P. pushes the issue hard enough.

Even more hard-hitting is a series I call The Out-of-Downtowners. It's got definite HBO-type potential, what with the African-American woman working at a hip downtown magazine and the Latino loner, who is also the only Latino in the office except for the Colombian immigrant cleaner. Each week the two of them have another adventure, usually above 14 th Street, like trying to eat at a bistro on Madison Avenue without being asked by other patrons to take their orders or tell them where the toilet is. They usually land up getting such weird looks - which, in the pilot, the Latino thinks have to do with his pierced lip - that they take refuge in an Ethiopian bar on Lexington Avenue. The alternative title: Whose Avenue is it Anyway?

The payoff for the network? Two major roles that are minor races. (There's even potential for the cleaner's character to become something bigger, at least after the minority-filled episode in which he passes his night-school English exam.)

The family series I've put together is about a young Asian-American woman married to a Polish guy from Brooklyn. If you set it uptown, there could even be a Jamaican maid, turning it into Dharma and Greg meets what The Nanny should have been, all with a multiethnic edge. The title, needless to say, came to me before anything else: The World of Suzie Wong-Smerczak. Seeing food's big in both cultures, lots of the episodes will take place around the kitchen table. The beauty of this is that the two leads can come from any minority with a decent cuisine (Bangladesh-Trinidad? Sumatra-Nigeria?), making the possibilities for cultural mix-'n-match endless.

The payoff for the network? An inevitable tie-in with the Food Channel.

As a mini-series or a movie of the week, there's The 6 Train, a taut thriller in which two worlds collide at a subway station. Let's call the subway station 96 th Street, the one group Upper East Siders and the other group Everyone Else North of Us. Imagine a kind of subterranean Capulet-Montague saga, where fans of Dolce & Gabbana clash with kids wearing baseball caps advertising Kahlil Muhammed. They push, bristle, jostle, call each other names under their breath. The one side will talk incessantly about the other, but only when they aren't within earshot. Think of the suspense. Think of the eclectic soundtrack. Think of the words that could be bleeped out.

The payoff? Enough humanitarian awards to shake an Emmy at.

Yours in anticipation, etc.

Submitted to The New Yorker, but rejected in an email that I deleted by mistake.