I think I just found an idea for an ongoing kid SF show I think I could get behind.
So: Imagine Star Trek from the perspective of an away team. A starship on a several-year mission of discovery and propaganda into unclaimed territory, spreading the good word about the United Federation of Planets.
But every other episode is another show. About an away team on a Klingon starship on a several-year mission of discovery and propaganda into unclaimed territory, spreading the good word about the Glorious Klingon Empire.
They’re not actually the Klingons and the Federation, of course. I’ll come up with good names eventually. For now it’s enough to know that one of them will be quietly “leftist” while the other will be quietly “rightist”. Neither will ever make a big deal of this.
Sometimes they have their own separate adventures. Find a planet with a problem, help them out with their problem, another win for Their Side, whichever one that is.
Sometimes they run into each other. At first always as adversaries. Who see each other as nasty caricatures. But as the show goes on, they occasionally find each other thrown together in a situation where they have to put their mutual hatred aside to survive in the face of some kind of Outside Context Problem, ranging from the small (on from each side stuck on an inhospitable planet with each other) to the large (oh shit we accidentally woke up the Creepy Ancient Anti-Life Robots and now we have to stop them from destroying both homeworlds).
So on a basic level we have “woo, spaceships, explosions, aliens, friendship, whee!”. But underneath that there is a serious attempt to get people to sympathize with the other side of the cultural conflict that’s going on in America nowadays. Not to necessarily agree with each other on everything. But to spend some time maybe rooting for the other side, and see a caricature of themselves through their eyes. Ideally I would get some right-wing people on the show’s staff to help make that side more believable, and to make the caricature of the lefties a bit sharper.
I feel like if I’m going to attempt to put together something aimed at kids, it behooves me to think about what I want to say to them. Now that I have this worked out, I think I can bullshit enough details to make a worthwhile pitch in the time between now and SPX, while also making a serious dent in the end of Rita.