Marebridge Todd Productions
A Radical Narrative
What does this young woman from the Middle East hope to achieve at University in California, and why does she want to keep it secret from everybody else? Her enigmatic, but clearly ambitious character is positively provocative to her budding friendships on and off campus. Green Davids, an aspiring filmmaker and also student at UCLA who is being driven mad by his own preoccupation with Middle East adventurism, is one. Another would be friend is a suburban poppy grower named Leaf Riley, also preoccupied (in his own uninterested way) with affairs that would seem abstract on its face; in Leaf's case the melting of Arctic ice. Then there's Dean Walker, an intellectual peer, well-connected gent, and fellow Poli-Sci undergrad, seemingly the perfect candidate for a friend. Fadia finds that one cannot be particular when making friends, especially when on a great journey alone, but she also finds that the threat of treachery is very real.
“Burdensome Subjects or Young Progressives” is a title that begs questions and is a question itself. Is it these young players who are the young progressives? What makes a young progressive, especially if one doesn’t identify as such, but is labeled as being one anyways? What is a burdensome subject, if not a topic most people don’t want to talk about? Season 1 will begin in August of 2014 and will finish at the tail-end of 2015. Each successive season would follow a similar timeframe. Throughout the long story, however, is an intermittent, gravitational pull back to the past. Not always the past of the young characters, themselves, but the historical past instead, bearing a more abstract connection to the central story which continually orbits within this web of past, present, and even future. The layers of our relevant characters pasts are indeed revealed in these intermittent flashbacks, but are usually preceded by another history, a greater history. That is why this can be considered a radical narrative.
The characters, like most people, are too busy dealing with the micro obstacles of everyday life, like forgetting fair for the bus, losing funds for school, or constantly struggling to stay under the radar of LAPD while working a small-time opium trade— things like that. The characters forge strong friendships, however, despite doubt, confusion, and existential crises. The series is a reflexive response to an Orwellian political culture that skyrocketed in the wake of the World Trade Center bombings. The apex of this political culture has yet to come, but one can imagine what an apex it would be! The writing of Burdensome Subjects or Young Progressives began shortly after the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. Presidency in 2016, and I had thought then it was a kind of apex; maybe it was, and we are now descending from that apex; its hard to know history when you're in it.
Each season will span over the course of years in similar fashion, and the full vision of the series is meant to follow events of history and politics as they move; and we of course move past the university these young adults attend, and we follow them into the "real world" as it were. This is by no means a story that’s confined by the parameter of the college. For example, Fadia Qudsi’s rise in the world of politics will be followed out of the university, and into her work on political campaigns, the halls of Congress, and so on. This is a series that can seize the gravitas of this moment we all find ourselves in. It is a story that travels wide and far, but always finds it’s way back around to its original stage, set on the most powerful nation on the planet, the United States of America.
As the U.S., other nations, and the world at large, face literal existential threats, there are also some of the strongest possibilities of redemptive justice, most of which can be found in the younger generations— in young progressives, it would seem. We will find, of course, there are plenty of boomers out there who want to do a bit of good as well. Even the doing of "good" is a problematic notion in a global culture soaked with greed, militarism, and hypocrisy. As BSYP Season 1 uncovers Fadia Qudsi’s Poli-Sci thesis layer by layer, we will find that BSYP, in its simplest form, is a story about livelihood, hope for the future, and the horrors of reality; in our modern day, all of it is political. It’s a story that captures the moment, can evolve with the moment, and even influence the moment if luck would have it.