Filman is the showrunner of a TV show called The Showrunner about a showrunner making a TV show called The Showrunner. Confused? So was the audience—or lack thereof.
When the show gets abruptly canceled mid-season, Filman finds himself magically transported to “TV Heaven,” a surreal town full of the greatest characters from television history. There he meets an assortment of citizens spanning a century of shows—from grayscale to animated, old to young, human, animal, robot, alien, and everything in between.
However, something is missing from this seeming paradise: Emma, the co-star and love interest from his show. As Filman struggles to adjust to life in TV Heaven, he goes through an existential crisis upon realizing he was just a fictional character on a television show.
Desperate to reunite with the woman he loves, Filman goes on a quest to return to the real world and find Emma. Hopefully then they can revive their show and give fans the cathartic ending they deserve.
TV Heaven – A Novel by T.Z. Barry
For fans of The Truman Show, Pleasantville, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Stranger Than Fiction, Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, The Good Place, The Studio, Hollywood satire, and television history.
What people are saying about TV Heaven:
- “I love acting. It is so much more real than life.” — Oscar Wilde
- “Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television.” — Woody Allen
- “I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can’t stop eating peanuts.” — Orson Welles
- “The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television—but then again, television, at its best, is magnificent.” — Steve Jobs
- “You’ve not felt the pain of rejection until a television show based on your own life is canceled.” — Ryan Murphy
- “The discarnate TV user lives in a world between fantasy and dream, and is in a typically hypnotic state, which is the ultimate form and level of participation.” — Marshall McLuhan
- “Television, as you know, can kind of jettison you into a whole new world.” — David Caruso
- “The space between the television set and the viewer is holy ground.” — Fred Rogers
The paperback edition of TV Heaven is available on Amazon. For now, the ebook edition is exclusively available on my Substack. If you are a paid subscriber to Time Zone Weird, you can download a PDF or EPUB of TV Heaven for free. (I also added digital downloads for Trick or Zombie Treat and Work for Idle Hands.) Everyone can read the first five chapters of TV Heaven on Substack.
T.Z. Barry 