For your consideration
First of all, just remember, whether it's a comedy or drama the best TV shows revolve around people and their interactions with one another. It doesn't matter if it's about police, doctors, soldiers, or superheroes. At its heart it has to be about people, or no one will watch it. So what might this show about application developers look like? Hmmm. Let me see...
Title: The Decompiled (something dramatic and suggestive of conflict and personal sacrifice)
The players: The brilliant but naieve CEO of a startup company. he/she is likeable, but far too trusting. Senior management is composed of people out for themselves. They don't care about the CEO's dreams. They'll do whatever it takes to get ahead, and then leave for new hunting grounds, leaving someone else to pick up the pieces. And finally the staff -- programmers, artists, writers and Quality Assurance. We'll omit for the purpose of this discussion the office staff.
The conflict: the staff is given vague, conflicting goals which they are forced to make sense of and deadlines that are created by the Marketing Manager that have no bearing on reality. Fortunately, the staff includes some of the best minds in the business (even if they are oddballs). But the more they meet these impossible goals, the farther the goalpost gets moved. Forced to work long hours, various staff members have to deal with marital problems (e.g. wife pregnant, but husband not allowed to be by her side due to another deadline/crisis). Another staff member is deep in debt due to poor judgement in making investments/spending/whatever and is forced to make money by selling IP to competition, working second job, ratting the company out for violating licensing. You get the idea. Add other forms of conflict such as lawsuits, C-and-D orders, security breaches, unreasonable investor demands, etc. The nature of the conflict doesn't matter. What does matter is how the various people deal with it. In the end, they get the job done, in spite of the potholes in the road before them.
Bottom line is: make it real, don't pull any punches, and cover real issues found in the real world of software development. The company succeeds brilliantly, of course, and the application that finally appears in the app store is a hit (which creates all new problems). But getting to that point isn't easy, and requires hard work and determination by the "people in the trenches". Sure it sounds like a soap opera, but some of the biggest hits on TV follow that formula to one degree or another. To paraphrase Bill Clinton, It's the people, stupid!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
