How To Pitch A Cable Show

Ouch!

Every once in a while an honest-to-God TV show comes up and just bites you in the ass…

That was how I felt when Dr. Adam Kushner dropped by the house for cup of coffee. He had a day to kill between a speech in Mongolia for the World Health Organization (yesterday), and his surgical work in Malawi (tomorrow).

Kushner is a board certified surgeon, but also the founder of Surgeons Over Seas.

Kushner started as an investment banker in Hong Kong, and he is smart enough that if he had stayed with that, he’d be lving on Park Avenue.  Instead he dropped the whole money thing and went to medical school.  Fair enough. Then he became a surgeon.  So far, so good.

After a few years of practicing medicine, however, he grew tired of the lucrative but ultimately unsatisfying practice.

So he headed to Africa.

The worst parts of Africa.

And there he found that while AIDS or malaria may get all the attention, the vast majority of Africans were dying not from those diseases (though there are surely enough) but rather from lack of access to decent surgical care.

In the entire country of Malawi, (where he does a great deal of work), there are only 3 surgeons.. for the whole country.

So instead of flying in and doing a few procedures, which is the kind of thing that Doctors Without Borders does, Kushner decided to try something different.

He has spent the past decade or more teaching locals to do surgery on their own.

Often, he says, this is more like McGuyver.  Most of the hospitals (and I use the word loosely), he works in have no running water, no electricity and often not even any sutures or gauze.

How do you do surgery like that?

He figures it out as he goes.. and then he passes his knowledge on to locals who can continue to work with the local population to save lives.

In the past decade he has seen things that no surgeon in the US sees in a lifetime – the man bitten by a crocodile, for example, pictured above.  Sometimes people will walk for days to get to his clinic… walk with broken limbs or shattered bodies.  Sometimes he sees women who have been in labor for a week or more, who somehow make their way to his hospitals.

His organization Surgeons Over Seas (SOS) now works with more than 120 US Surgeons to take them overseas and have them also teach the locals surgical techniques that can save lives.

Some surgeons, he says, are good at this. Others simply freak out at the conditions they encounter.

His yearly (let me say that again), his yearly budget for SOS is…$35,000.

Total.

Like I said, he walked away from a lot to do this.

He is funded by friends and family.

When he arrives in a country, he sleeps in the hospitals – to be closer to the patients and because he just can’t afford a hotel room.

Needless to say, I think there’s TV series in this – for National Geographic or Discovery Health or somebody like that.

God only knows, we expend enough time, effort and money in the TV business on pure crap.

Suppose we had a chance to do a reality show with Albert Schweitzer or Mother Theresa… would we do it?

Kushner took one of our face to face bootcamps and learned how to shoot and cut on his own.  So he take his video camera wherever he goes.  We assembled some of his footage for a pitch reel to try and sell his series to Nat Geo or Discovery.  I've posted the pitch reel here on NYVS.com

If there's room for a third season of Cake Makers on cable, there surely must be room for this.

I’m gonna start pitching.

I’ll let you know how it goes.