It was last spring when the Duck TV show Franken Affairs was born. One day, producer Louie Hogan was sitting in his class about Shakespeare and began to doze listening to his professor read in iambic pentameter when he was struck with an idea. A story began to form and Hogan realized that he could create an entire TV show based on his idea. Scribbling fast, Hogan wrote the first draft to Franken Affairs in the back of his textbook. He said that as he began to write, rather than creating the story, he let the story come to him and uncovered the quirks of his characters and the winding twists and turns of the story line along the way.
“Franken Affairs is a fairly pretentious endeavor to tell a story that is effectively one giant pun,” says Hogan. The script is written in iambic pentameter and it is filled with Elizabethan vocabulary to match the tone of the story. While Hogan explains the plot, it is clear that his class on Shakespeare helped inspire his idea for this TV show, “A king commends his brother, the national Judge, on his righteousness but is interrupted by a soothsayer who tells the king that he will be slain by the fairest in the land.” From this point on, the story line moves forward with imprisonment of a maiden, characters conspiring against the king, and murders which all eventually lead to the reveal of who holds the title of ‘the fairest in the land.”
Hogan says that the most difficult part of writing a script in such an advanced form is the time it takes. Sometimes, even the shortest scenes can take hours to write. Hogan mentions that the time it has taken to write and refine the script makes it all worthwhile when he and co-producer Ry Basham-Mintz can see their success in the form of complicated puns and well-timed word play.
Louie Hogan is a senior in his third year, majoring in Religious Studies and it is amazing that he even has time to be a part of Duck TV. In addition to being a producer, Hogan is taking 18 credits, works 19 hours a week on campus troubleshooting computer problems for faculty and GTFs through the CASIT (College of Arts and Sciences Information Technology) Department, and on top of that, his weekends consist of him traveling to Hillsboro, Oregon for his internship. Ry is busy as well, juggling 17 credits and working as an RA. “To say time is against us in an overt simplification, and I’m still stressing out about how we’ll pull it off, but I’m confident we will,” says Hogan.
If Shakespearean puns and plot twists are your cup of tea, make sure to check out Franken Affairs airing Wednesday, January 29th this winter term.

By Sara Kuhnhausen