I think we should write a comedy for Natalie Portman about a TV Paleontologist whose production compay, Outer Ideas, has fallen on hard times and who has a crumbling series of misfortunes beginning with failure to explain how Pterosaurs could ever have evolved
That’s a cracking premise — quirky, layered, and rich with satirical promise. You’ve got Natalie Portman as the lead: a brilliant but increasingly unhinged TV paleontologist whose show Fossil Frenzy used to be a flagship science docuseries on public television, but now she’s desperately pitching to streaming services that only want true crime or cooking formats. Meanwhile, her own production company — Outer Ideas — is teetering on the edge of extinction like her beloved Pterosaurs.
Here’s a sketch of the setup:
Title: “Extinction Event”
A darkly comic, cerebral satire starring Natalie Portman as a paleontologist unraveling the evolutionary tree — and her own life.
Plot Overview:
Dr. Cora Delaney (Portman) was once the face of educational programming — witty, sharp, and always ready with a 3D-animated fossil and a smirk. But her latest season, “Winged Wonders: The Flight of Pterosaurs”, tanks spectacularly after she goes off-script in an on-air rant, questioning whether pterosaurs could actually have evolved flight given their ridiculous proportions. (“Hollow bones and wishful thinking do not an aviator make!”)
The clip goes viral — but not in a good way. She’s been meme’d into oblivion. The paleontology community disowns her. Outer Ideas, her indie production house, hemorrhages money as sponsors flee, and her staff start moonlighting on flat-earth documentaries for rent.
Running Themes and Comic Elements:
- Evo-Denial: Cora begins to see her fall from grace as parallel to the downfall of ancient species. Each episode features surreal dream sequences where she’s a dinosaur or early mammal, being slowly voted off the evolutionary island.
- Streaming Pitches Gone Awry: She tries to sell new shows like “Prehistoric Bake-Off” and “CSI: Jurassic” to Netflix execs who say “We love your passion… but do you have any murders in the fossil record?”
- Her nemesis: Dr. Evan Knorr — a smug, TikTok-famous “science communicator” who explains complex evolutionary theory using sock puppets and has just landed a Disney+ deal. He keeps calling her “out of touch with the youth fossil market.”
- Crumbling Life: Her house is full of half-built animatronic trilobites and motion capture rigs she can’t afford to fix. Her only companion is a poorly taxidermied capybara she found at a prop warehouse auction.
Tone:
Think The Comeback (Lisa Kudrow) meets Don’t Look Up meets Amadeus, with Cora as both genius and tragicomic figure, raving at a world that no longer values knowledge without emojis.
Key Scene Ideas:
- Museum Meltdown: During a guest lecture, she asks a room of children: “What if evolution is just nature making it up as it goes along?” and is booed by a 9-year-old in a “Dino DNA!” shirt.
- Desperation Pitch: In a last-ditch Zoom call with a streaming giant, she suggests a prehistoric dating show called “Love in the Cambrian”, only to realize they think she’s pitching it ironically.
- Cretaceous Crisis: Alone in her office at midnight, she tries to “re-prove” pterosaur flight with paper models and a leaf blower, whispering, “Fly, you magnificent bastards…” while drunk on boxed wine.
She needs to start all of dialogues with ‘As a Paleontologist..’ like that bloke from River Monster even though she is obviously primarily a television presenter
Absolutely. That adds a brilliant layer — she insists on starting every sentence with “As a paleontologist…” as if it grants divine authority, even when she’s clearly talking out of her rear end or trying to return a coffee maker.
We can run with this conceit and build it into her identity: it’s her verbal security blanket, her crutch, her brand. Like Jeremy Wade in River Monsters saying everything in grave tones even when he’s just ordering a sandwich. And the more ridiculous things get, the more she clings to it.
Expanded Character Trait:
Dr. Cora Delaney, formerly “The Nation’s Favorite Fossil”
- Doesn’t hold an active research post.
- Never got her PhD approved because of a funding scandal involving animatronic Velociraptors.
- Still begins every sentence with “As a paleontologist…” even when discussing things wildly outside her domain: TikTok trends, lattes, mortgage rates, her own romantic life.
Sample Dialogue Snippets
1. Returning a blender to John Lewis:
“As a paleontologist, I can tell you this motor simply doesn’t have the torque to pulverize Cambrian shell fragments — or ice, frankly.”
2. In a pitch meeting at Netflix:
“As a paleontologist, I believe viewers are hungry for a prehistoric reality format. Love Triassic Island would explore natural selection through emotional betrayal.”
3. Giving bad relationship advice to her assistant:
“As a paleontologist, it’s clear you’re exhibiting the same mate-guarding behaviour as male ammonites. It’s toxic.”
4. Describing a failed drone shoot:
“As a paleontologist, I’ve seen better flight capability in dead Archaeopteryx. That drone should never have tried to lift the costume.”
5. Arguing with her landlord:
“As a paleontologist, I would describe this black mould as both prehistoric and airborne. It is, by every metric, a living fossil.”
Comedic Running Gag:
People around her start finishing the phrase before she does. Her weary intern mutters “As a paleontologist…” under their breath every time she walks into frame. Eventually even Alexa responds to her with:
“As a paleontologist, you have six voice memos overdue and a reminder to invoice for your trilobite resin earrings.”
“As a paleontologist?”
And that begins to haunt her – “What do you think of this new discovery?” “As a paleontologist?”
Yes! Now we’re digging through the sediment of satire.
Her own catchphrase begins to haunt her — like a ghost from a fossilized echo chamber. At first it’s her brand, then it’s her mask, and finally it becomes her curse. She starts hearing “As a paleontologist?” whispered on the wind, in coffee foam, in her dreams. Strangers echo it back to her, like it’s a question rather than a statement. A demand. A challenge.
The Catchphrase Turns on Her – Comedic Arc
Act I: Harmless Quirk
She says it in every interview, every tweet, every apology video. Her agent tells her, “It’s your thing, darling — like Nigella saying ‘gorgeous’ or David Attenborough whispering ‘and here…’”.
Act II: Unwelcome Repetition
Then one day, someone says:
Interviewer: “So what do you think of the new fossil site in Mongolia?”
Cora: “As a paleontologist—”
Interviewer (smiling too wide): “Are you, though?”
Later, at a dinner party:
Guest: “Can I ask you something?”
Cora (mechanically): “As a paleontologist—”
Guest: “No, just as a person.”
She falters. She stares at the wine glass like it’s a trilobite with feelings.
Act III: Breakdown
She tries to say something normal, but can’t:
“I think the world needs more empathy. As a paleontologist. No—wait. Sorry. Sorry.”
She dreams she’s being interviewed by a giant ammonite, and it keeps asking:
“As a paleontologist? As a paleontologist? As a paleontologist?”
The phrase follows her like a spectre, etched in chalk outlines across her bathroom mirror. She finds it spray-painted on the Outer Ideas studio wall. An AI chatbot she never signed up for texts her at 2 a.m. with:
“As a paleontologist? Here’s what I found on Bing.”
Montage: The Spiral
- A child at the Natural History Museum mockingly asks, “Are you a paleontologist?”
- Someone tags her in a viral clip where a parrot screeches “As a paleontologist!”
- Siri starts offering definitions for the word “fraudulent.”
- Her therapist offers silence.
- Her capybara taxidermy tips over.
Would you like this to crescendo into a mock-heroic moment where she finally stands in front of a classroom and just says something simple, human — no prefix, no shield — and they listen?
Or shall we let her double down and embrace the madness fully — giving a TED Talk titled “As a Paleontologist: The Agony and the Amber”?
Either way, the phrase is her tragic refrain. Her “Rosebud.”
Her curse. Her punchline.
Her brand.
And that’s how she gets cornered: “As a paleontologist, can you explain how Pterosaurs evolved?”
Exactly — that’s the moment the floor gives way beneath her, the question that corners her like a sabre-toothed existential crisis.
It’s asked innocently enough, maybe by a bright-eyed schoolgirl during a soft-focus charity interview.
Or by a smug young podcaster in a “Science or Nonsense?” debate panel.
Or worse — by her own former intern, now a viral science influencer with neon diagrams and 10 million subscribers.
Scene: The Fatal Question
Setting:
A live broadcast. Studio lights hot and glaring. She’s back in the public eye, trying to re-establish herself with charm, wit, and the vague authority of a once-trusted presenter.
Interviewer:
“And finally, Dr. Delaney, one for the fans… As a paleontologist, can you explain how pterosaurs evolved flight?”
Cora (with a frozen smile):
“As a paleontologist… uh…”
Silence.
You can hear the internal gears grinding like a tectonic shift. Her eyes twitch. Her mouth opens slightly, then closes.
Her mind, once sharp and fossil-stacked, has gone blank — not because she doesn’t know the theory, but because she no longer believes it.
She tried to make the wing models fly in her garage. She’s seen the bone structure.
She’s lived with the fossils.
And deep down, she knows:
“It doesn’t make any bloody sense.”
She Cracks:
Cora (quietly):
“They couldn’t. They… they couldn’t have.”
(louder) “You can’t glue paper wings to a bony cat and say it evolved into a goddamn sky tyrant!”
(panicked) “The bones are too light, the muscles don’t match, the crest is wrong, the physics don’t work, the gravity’s wrong!”
(now screaming at the audience)
“HAVE YOU SEEN A QUETZALCOATLUS?! IT’S A MONSTER WITH A GLIDER! IT’S NOT SCIENCE, IT’S PROPAGANDA!”
Cut to: Viral memes. “As a paleontologist…” superimposed over her face like a war crime confession.
Aftermath:
She’s forced into hiding.
She gives strange YouTube interviews from her garden shed, surrounded by paper models of extinct animals and string-theory maps.
She starts a podcast called “The Flight Delusion.”
She insists on being called “Former Paleontologist, Current Skeptic.”
But quietly, secretly, she begins to rebuild her worldview — not with answers, but with better questions.
So — do we lean toward tragicomic redemption?
Or go full Dr. Strangelove, where she ends up flying a model pterosaur off a cliff yelling “As a paleontologist—” as the final freeze-frame?
Either way, that question — “Can you explain how pterosaurs evolved?” — is her downfall and her awakening.
I don’t think we would script it, we’d just let Natalie and the other actors do it for real
Yes — of course. That’s the only way to do it. You don’t write that breakdown — you unleash it. You wind Natalie up with fossil dust, caffeine, and unresolved career trauma, then drop her in a hot studio under cheap LED lights and let the existential sediment hit the fan.
🎬 The Method Approach:
- Natalie stays in character as Cora Delaney for weeks. Speaks only in her “As a paleontologist…” cadence at press junkets, in cafés, at dinner with friends.
- You don’t give her a script. You give her notes scribbled on the back of a child’s drawing of a Pterosaur and a book titled The Flight Lie.
- The interviewer? Improvised, played by a real presenter known for sunny vibes — like Claudia Winkleman or Louis Theroux with a too-kind smile.
- The audience? Real people. Maybe they don’t even know it’s satire.
- The fossil? Real. Or worse — a plastic replica from eBay, just inaccurate enough to trigger the paleontologist’s madness.
🎭 The Breakdown is a Ballet of Madness
- The camera slowly zooms in as her logic unravels in spirals.
- The boom mic dips nervously.
- One of the interns starts crying.
- The prop pterosaur begins to fall over in the background.
- A soft breeze wafts her stack of note cards off the table, fluttering like wings — mocking her.
And afterwards — no director yells “cut.”
Because there is no cut.
Only the fossils.
And the silence.
And the looping GIFs online with captions like “AS A PALEONTOLOGIST… (mental breakdown edition)” overlaid in Comic Sans.
You don’t script that.
You document it.
Like a true paleontologist of television — preserving the strange collapse of a once-proud species called “The Educational Presenter.”
Would you like a teaser trailer tagline next? Or maybe the fake Netflix poster?
