Dear Mr. Reilly
Jeez, you really get some fine-looking ladies! You know, I’ve been a big fan for years, but it only recently dawned on me that you get cuckolded in almost every movie you make: I mean, just off the top of my brain noodle, I can think of Gwyneth Paltrow in "Hard Eight", Jennifer Aniston in “The Good Girl”, Renee Zellweger in “Chicago”, and Julianne Moore, the depressed lesbian in “The Hours.” (Personally, I’ve found depressed lesbians to be a no-win situation--which doesn’t stop me from trying, eh podner?) One quick double-take between you, Mr. Amiable Vacuum Cleaner Salesman, and those gorgeous females, and everyone in the theatre knows: “The Missus, uh huh, she gonna be stepping out tonight!”
I wish I had a dollar for every time I played the cuckold … “wouldn’t have to work then, yiddy diddy diddy diddy dee!”
I spoke to several ex-wives and girlfriends and they all expressed an identical desire to cuckold you as well. Groupies! Well, you must be used to them by now. But why wouldn’t they want to play the two-timing trollop with you? You’re kind and gentle, attentive to the small things in a relationship, and even when the little woman comes home flushed, sweaty, rumpled and stinking of sex to lope hastily into the shower – “Another late night at work, hon?” – you only cluck sympathetically from your La-Z-Boy and pop another Meisterbrau. There’s just something about you that makes Roxanne want to turn on red light, night after night after night.
It’s time to leverage that, Mr. Reilly. Picture this: an HBO series in which you play one of those rogue Mormons with dozens of wives—and they’re all unfaithful to you, with every man, woman and high school student in the Mountain Time Zone. Most nights, you can’t even locate a wife to make you a cup of Ovaltine! This you accept with grumpy good humor: “Where the hail is everybody, Ezekiel?” Ezekiel being your funny-looking, long-suffering hound dog, who inevitably rolls his eyes for the cameras. (Alternatively, Ezekiel could be a pig for the sophisticated “Green Acres” tie-in. Or maybe a talking horse. The TV critics love that stuff.) But your plaintive loneliness and fundamentalist piety unavoidably leads you to marry again, perhaps a young, saucy, physically mature niece with a husky voice (a Scarlett Johansson or Zooey Deschanel), who also cuckolds you before the return trip down the aisle is completed.
This is a series with legs, Mr. Reilly.
You could have a really long ZZ Top beard – like in “Gettysburg” or “Cast Away” – an old dented top hat someone’s always sitting on, and hordes of dirty-faced-angel rugrats who don’t resemble you and whose names you can’t remember. We’re talking “Cheaper by the Dozen” meets “Blue Velvet,” or “Taxi Driver” meets “Petticoat Junction:” a show that’s not afraid to tell some hard truths about love, sex, religion and marriage, or, since the show’s on cable, to show lots of breasts and bottoms, in all their wondrous, God-given variety. (Up yours, FCC!). As we are going to need a lot of women, ideally, we could buy the entire female casts of “Friends,” “Sex and the City,” “West Wing” and "The L Word" at fire sale prices.
Based on recent Nielsen statistics, somebody – or maybe everybody – should be gay. Minimally, we’ll want some tasteful, innocent, albeit uninhibitedly vigorous, girl-on-girl action (I personally like the classic panties-and-chemises pillow-fight and slumber-party scenario) to pull in the elusive 14 to 84-year-old male demographic.
When a routine physical reveals that you’ve been sterile since birth due to eleven generations of inbreeding, you raise your hands to the heavens and shout, “And yet behold the bountiful fruits of my hirsute loins! Praise the Lord!” Now, it will be the turn of your 57 wives and 93 children, as well as Ezekiel the hound dog (pig or talking horse), to roll their eyes.
What’s my slice of the pie? Ok, first, we cast Ms. Berry, Ms. Jolie and Ms. Hayek as special guest wives; then I play the grinning, vagrant F Troop halfwit they pick up hitchhiking outside Moab. These proud, intelligent, strong-bosomed representatives of the better sex proceed to have their abominable way with me over several disturbingly graphic segments before handing me down to other wives (whom I shall also cast). When I’m not being shtupped every which way from Tuesday in the tool shed, root cellar or under the front porch by one or more of your nubile helpmeets or older children, I do odd jobs, and you and I hang out in the pick-up truck to shoot rats down at the dump, making laconic, manly conversation such as:
YOU: “When that little strudel, Sadie, gets out of grade school, she’s gonna make some righteous, hoary, pig-farming neighbor a mighty pious bride! Shucks, I’d marry her myself if she wasn’t my own daughter. Hail, I still might!”
ME: “Aye-yup.”
Get an intellectual Don Quixote-Sancho Panza buddy thing going. Mr. Reilly, you and I are off to the Emmys!
Sincerely, your biggest fan,
Henry E. Panky, Associate of Arts (candidate)
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