Web Video / Dream Machine

Programming executive Ryan Dresden (Eric Cheung) pitches writer Leah Lucchesi (Naomi Ibatsitas) on doing a new show for Dream Machine TV.

Ryan: I know it’s your baby. But it’s all grown up now— and got in a motorcycle crash that nobody can look away from. Nothing to do now but harvest the organs while they’re still viable.

—From the pilot episode The Show Must Go Off

Dream Machine by Phoebe Roberts and Bernie Gabin is a comedy show presented in staged readings over Zoom about the crew of the titular cheap women’s cable TV network.

TV writer Leah Lucchesi has charmed and clawed her way into a hit Downton Abbey-esque show. But when that show faces cancellation, she must learn to be flexible, collaborative, and real if she wants to start something new. Ryan Dresden is known as a hotshot movie producer, but after his drug addiction torches all his work and personal relationships, a programming job at Leah's network Dream Machine is his only option for getting back in the game. Representing the uneasy relationship between the creative and the commercial in art, they must find a way to work together to save both of their careers. Dream Machine is a show about people who have spent their lives relating to others only at a remove and by proxy, and now must find a way to form genuine connections to survive and thrive.

Dream Machine is presented in the form of staged readings in screenplay format over Zoom, with minor costuming and staging in each actor’s performance window. Stage directions are read by actors serving as narrators for the scene.

Currently, there are four episodes in the series:

• 1.01. The Show Must Go Off
• 1.02. Requiem For a Dreamer
• 1.03. Change or Die
• 1.04. The Opposite of People

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Tropes:

• Actually a Good Idea: Leah says this of Josie’s threat to tap dance at Leah’s funeral in In episode 1.04, The Opposite of People.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: In episode 1.04, The Opposite of People, Leah complains about having to write around guest actors’ “schedules,” “their vertigo,” and “their no-nudity clauses.”
• Birthday Hater: Leah, with her fear of aging and age-related unattractiveness. “Sheet cake is not worth the reminder of creeping decay!”
• Break Them by Talking: In episode 1.04, The Opposite of People, Josie gets Leah to finally work on her character with her by refusing to shut up and leave her alone.
• Broken Ace: Ryan Dresden. He was a hotshot Hollywood film producer, but eventually his drug habit got so bad he destroyed all his personal and professional relationships. He ends up working at Dream Machine because a third-rate cable network is the only place that will take him.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Leah Lucchesi may be “self-centered, fake, shallow, and allergic to showers”... but she’s a damn good writer and storyteller.
• Brutal Honesty: Derek has organized his whole personality around being this.
• The Cassandra: Meredith frequently speaks out as the most sensible voice, but is often ignored by the considerably less sensible people around her.
• Cool Shades: Frequently worn by Ryan.
  • Also by Leah in 1.04. The Opposite of People, when she’s feeling herself
• Dirty Old Woman: Priscilla De Marco in 1.03. Change or Die. She hits on Ryan rather aggressively, though he’s still struggling with his shift to appealing mostly to the older generation.
• Eating the Eye Candy: Leah’s favorite past time, with all the handsome actors and other guys at the studio. Most prominently with Devon, Jeremy, and Tom.
• Extreme Close-Up: One of the actors auditioning for the role of Duncan in Offcomer in 1.04. The Opposite of People. He’s afraid that moving too far away from the camera will mean the nuances of his Casablanca monologue will be lost.
• Extreme Doormat: Josie. She’s so desperate for approval she’ll basically do anything to please the people around her.
• Fangirl: Meredith relates to media in the manner of an obsessive nerd, including shows she’s worked on. She even ships the characters.
• Feeling Their Age: In episode 1.03, Change or Die, Ryan throws his back out and must confront how he’s grown older during the time he was checked out on drugs, and how hard that is when you work in a youth-oriented industry like Hollywood entertainment.
• Food Fight: In episode 1.02, Requiem For a Dreamer, Leah and Ryan wrestle over ice cream and threaten each other with it.
• Friends with Benefits: Leah and Devon. They've had a casual hookup relationship that started when they worked on West Chesterham.
• Functional Addict: Ryan for the previous fifteen years of his career— until he wasn’t functional anymore.
• Gentleman Snarker: Ryan, Derek, and Meredith by turns.
• Green-Eyed Monster: In episode 1.04, The Opposite of People, Leah implies that she’s jealous of actors like Josie getting all the credit for their work as the face of it visible to the public, when Leah’s writing is where it all begins.
• Guy on Guy Is Hot: There is a lot of shipping slashed characters from the shows. And actors.
• Head-Tiltingly Kinky: Ryan and Josie’s reaction to the West Chesterham-themed adult fan art Leah was looking at.
• I Can't Do This by Myself: In 1.01, The Show Must Go Off, Ryan exhorting Leah to work with him to build a new show to save both of their careers.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Ryan’s justification for why he cancelled West Chesterham. He was hired to make the network profitable, and he’s got to hang onto his own job as well as Leah’s.
• Imagine Spot: When Devon and Tom start fighting in episode 1.04, The Opposite of People, Leah imagines them as the hero and the villain of the Offcomer series, which leads her to cast them accordingly in the show.
• Inconvenient Attraction: Leah is very annoyed to find the much older and frequently frustrating to her Ryan attractive.
• Insecure Protagonist, Arrogant Antagonist: Josie versus Leah in episode 1.04, The Opposite of People. Josie’s insecurities make it difficult for her to insist on Leah helping her figure out her character, while Leah’s arrogance make me feel like she can walk all over Josie and do whatever she wants.
• Man in a Kilt: The hero of the time travel romance show they’re producing, Duncan Taggart. His arch rival Samuel Braeburn too, for that matter.
• Meet Cute: Josie and Tom appear to have one when they run into each other in the hallway after Tom’s audition in episode 1.04, The Opposite of People.
• Meta Fiction: It’s a concept for a TV show about a TV show. And the people who make it.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: A lot of Ryan Dresden’s backstory is inspired by the life of Robert Downey, Jr. They even have the same initials, RD.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: Subverted with Ryan. Leah believes him to be one when he cancels her first show in 1.01, The Show Must Go Off, but he goes on to help her put her next project together.
• Painting the Medium: When pitching idea for the new TV show in 1.02, Requiem For a Dreamer, Josie appears on location and in costume as she might as if she were in that show.
  • It happens similarly in 1.04, The Opposite of People, when Josie and Tom are reading as their Offcomer characters Katrina and Duncan, people in the 18th Century Scottish Highlands.
• The Perfectionist: Meredith shows these tendencies, particularly in her work organizing and producing for the show.
• Please Put Some Clothes On: Before to they get to work in 1.04, The Opposite of People, Josie tries to get Leah to get dressed again after the fire sprinklers drench them. But Leah has no intention of doing so, because she insists she works best that way.
• Quintessential British Gentleman: In West Chesterham, Devon Chambers’s character Duke Winston Coville is romanticized as one.
  • Subverted with Devon himself, a coarse East London chav.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: Leah, whenever she’s decided she wants to impress.
• Show Within a Show: West Chesterham, the Downton Abbey parody that brought Leah to prominence, and then Offcomer, the Outlander parody that becomes the main project the crew works on.
• Stylistic Suck: Usually when a moment from one of the in-universe shows is depicted, it is intentionally ridiculous in satire of the original property it's referencing.
• Tall, Dark, and Handsome: Tom Vincent is implied to be this, even stating his height to be six foot eight.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Leah’s initial reaction to working with basically anyone:
  • Like in 1.02 Requiem For a Dreamer, when Ryan tries to get her to figure out a concept for a new show
  • Or in 1.04 The Opposite of People, when Josie wants figure out her Offcomer character together
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Josie. She is desperate to prove to her parents— and really everyone else —that her choice to become an actress has paid off.