Joni Ravenna

God's Waiting Room Budget: $1M - $5M | Comedy                                                         ‘GOD’S WAITING ROOM’*                                                      By Joni Ravenna and Eric Donald  ‘God’s Waiting Room’ AKA Palm Springs, California, where the only thing that moves fast is ambulance dispatch. The natives are winded, the snow-birds are molting and boys wear pink. It’s the land of rays, gays, and grays. Here, taut-faced, diamond-encrusted, female fifty-somethings try to look thirty-something, and their forty-something doctors help them. One such accomplice, gynecologist, Jerry Hamilton, replaces more hormones in one year than Vegas does light bulbs. And he’s got the bucks to prove it. Jerry is attractive, a father of six, and a more than generous provider to his beautiful, church-going wife, Jackie. They are the perfect, tight-knit family, but for one thing: Jerry is gay, and his loved ones are about to find out the hard way. To make matters worse, the discovery comes on the heels of the death of middle-child, eleven-year-old Johnny Hamilton, a one-boy, skate-boarding, Greek Chorus through whose eyes the story unfolds. Johnny is a normal, eleven-year-old kid, only dead… and with a much more colorful vocabulary. His growing concern is that the family – in the midst of their dilemma – seems to have forgotten that he ever existed at all, as evidenced by the large family portrait taken after his death which sits at the top of the stairs. Why he's stuck in Limbo is mystery to us all (until the final episode of the season). Jerry’s older sons, Jeremy and Jason, appear more distraught by the damage Dad’s outing will have on their image at high school rather than the damage it will do to the family unit. Middle daughter, thirteen-year-old Jessica, worries about the direction her own budding sexuality might take, and the two youngest siblings, Jimmy and Jenny, just want to know where the Halloween candy went. The pilot culminates as it began, with a grand ball at the Hamilton manor. Only now, no freaky costumes, just a somewhat awkward celebration of an entirely new type of family with an entirely new beginning… One that’s perfectly suited to life in God's Waiting Room.