a few months ago i came up with an idea for a tv pilot called “smith & wesson” about two private eyes who pack a LOT of heat. it was the hilariously violent story of two private eyes: smith, who was kicked off the force in l.a. and wesson, who was kicked off the force in new york. they basically stumble around the early seventies, occasionally solving crimes and always shooting anything that moves.

it was going to be groundbreaking television, the kind of genre-spanning dynamite that wins emmys and makes a nation fall in love with calista flockheart. or at the very least it might get me a shitty job as a production assistant.

“smith & wesson” seemed like the best name ever for a ridiculous cop show so i searched extensively to make sure that no one else had used it. amazingly, i couldn’t find any show or comedy sketch or anything that used the name. so for the past few months i’ve been working on ideas for it while i wrote other inferior stuff. the pilot involved children with chronic amnesia being suckered into running drugs, a high school gang based on the ziggy stardust mythology and smith and wesson accidentally murdering their first client. i was just about to start writing the actual script next week.

so earlier today my girlfriend emily and i were watching the dvd box set of boomtown, a cop show from 2002 that was cancelled pretty quickly. episode 7 centers on a robbery gone bad at a sporting goods store. the two perps hold all the employees hostage, including the manager (played by joe penny, jake from jake and the fatman). in the show, joe penny just so happens to play former actor “les van buren” who starred in an eighties cop show. and guess what the goddamn show was.

the episode’s fictional show-within-a-show, “insured by smith & wesson,” featured two cops named smith and wesson shooting anything that moves. the name might not be exactly the same, but there’s no way i can write “smith & wesson” now. i could change the name, but then what the hell’s the point? emily didn’t understand why I was crying.

damn you, producers of boomtown! allowing donnie wahlberg and bubba from forrest gump to cotinue working in hollywood (as partners, no less) was bad enough. but you took my brilliant, million dollar idea and used it for 30 seconds worth of clips* on your show that nobody watched. you may have thought of it first, but i thought of it BEST!

*interestingly enough, the clips from “insured by smith & wesson” were actually taken from joe penny’s eighties cop show “riptide.”