Keeping Up with the Greens: Frank's House Episode I: Of Fathers and Suns

Forget keeping up with the Joneses. Try keeping up with the Greens!

This is our entry for the Tree Hugger TV EPIC (Ethical Progressive Intelligent Consumer) video contest. The idea is to show how you walk the walk as well as talk the talk. Frank and I decided to video tape the real progress he has made with his family home in Windsor California, and play him off against a fictional (but all too real) "neighbor" (played by Cairo based T.H. Culhane) who is obsessed by "keeping up with the Joneses" but doesn't quite understand what competing to be eco-friendly is really all about.

With this video Frank and I establish the two main characters who will eventually appear in a full blown series we are in development on called "Keeping up with the Greens: Frank's House" - Frank DiMassa (who will be renamed "Frank Green") a utility consultant and homeowner with a wife and two kids who lives in a "Truman Show" kind of model American surburban enclave that is a manicured, sterile and ecologically tragic landscape that he hates, and Tom Culhane (who will be renamed "Tom Brown"), a man perfectly adapted to the artificial paradise who believes that global warming is part of a "State of Fear" conspiracy concocted by Enviro-wackos and that bigger is always better.

The names Frank Green and Tom Brown go along with our previous instructional video on "The electron pool" where we showed people the difference between "green electrons" and "brown electrons". Frank consumes (and produces!) only "Green Electrons" while Tom consumes massive amounts of purely 'Brown Electrons".

The tension between these two figures and the relationship with their wives and children ultimately creates an optimistic look at how even the most stubborn of American consumers can find ways to compete their way toward cooperation and sustainability.