The Cleaner : A "Crime Scene Cleanup" Reality Show

Really Gross Reality Show Rough Draft

This reality show concept about the lives of a "crime scene" cleaning crew was brought to us already well into development, with an epic show opening... and not much else. It hasn't made it past the teaser stage, but still represents a pretty decent idea that could certainly be on TV somewhere.

The lady in charge ran a successful "extreme cleaning" service, and somewhere in there was probably a decent idea for a TV show. She had endless stories of the gross and bizarre things she had seen during her years in business... really fascinating and disgusting stuff, so a series could have been quite interesting.

There are obviously lots and lots of challenges for a project like this... the first being that no one ever quite settled on what this show should be, which makes it difficult to make any real progress. Originally I believe it was pitched as the story of a sort of quasi-governmental clearning task force being sent around the country to fight extreme dirtiness or something utterly nonsensical like that... so everything shot was sort of unfocused in concept, and therefore difficult to cut together.  

Sharp-eyed viewers might notice it is at times ACTUALLY unfocused, because whatever genius freelancers we hired in California to shoot this hoarder case couldn't even be bothered to manually focus on the interview subjects on location, and thus auto-focused on the trees in the background. Which I guess is what you get for hiring random, low-cost schmoes... an important lesson that just because they live in LA, it doesn't neccessarily mean they know what they're doing.

This particular version is obviously a fairly rough draft... there are holes aplenty in the graphics and editing... but was intended just to start working out some ideas for how the show might progress. Each cleaning job would be treated almost like a mystery, with various experts re-creating the crime through the evidence of the cleaning aftermath. There were so many interesting potential cases... murders, suicides, hoarders, horrific accidents of all kinds... I still think the idea has potential, and you can almost see it start to make sense as the teaser progresses. Almost.

The same goes for the title sequence / show opening... it was mostly just an idea I was trying out, a grabby title in the modern, short style. The original show opening... that apparently used up almost the entire show budget... was probably the single most awesome part of the entire project, a 2-minute epic marvel of bombast and ridiculousness straight from the 80's, sort of Knight Rider meets CSI. It was actually quite awesome in its way, but didn't quite match the tone of the show... so I made a short, cheap opening as a placeholder for something better.

I found the background texture online, made the blood with splatter brushes and masks, and green screened my arm in there to clean up the mess. I also snagged the light and shotgun SFX online, but recorded the brush sounds with that scrub brush out in my driveway. Authentic! Throughout the show, I added original "creepy music moodscapes" to earn me that music credit. 

Once you take all the practicalities into account, the way to make this show is as a series of reality-style re-enactments of all the most interesting of The Cleaner's cases, presented as real-life, docu-drama-reality style.  She had a LOT of good stories... we could totally make this a reality-based, low-rent cable CSI, I tell you.