Jane Doe

Strange in the City is a retro-futurist friendship series about four women trying to build lives, relationships, careers, and a sense of home in a very strange version of San Francisco. Jane is a human waitress at the Lunar Diner, a stubbornly old-fashioned restaurant serving real cheeseburgers in a city where almost everything else has become synthetic, cultured, augmented, automated, or designer-made. Her roommate Destiny is quietly navigating a future where medical technology can save your life while also making class visible on your body. Lyra is an alien woman starting over in a city that treats extraterrestrial life as ordinary but still hasn’t figured out how to make immigration easy. Around them are old kitchen robots, luxury biotech, hacked street augmentations, synthetic fashion, weird dating lives, robot safety systems, wealthy men who can afford to look completely human, broke people held together by visible machinery, and a city where humans, aliens, clones, robots and transhumans all share the same buses, apartments, bars, diners and bad decisions. But the technology isn’t really the point. The show is about female friendship. It’s about the people you come home to. It’s about becoming yourself in a world that keeps changing what a person is allowed to be. Strange in the City is currently being created as a short-form experimental series for Future Daughter, with new episodes planned for Wednesdays. About the experimental art This project is also an experiment in what independent storytelling can look like right now. I’m using generative tools as part of the production process to build sets, characters, costumes, environments and short cinematic scenes for a show that would otherwise require a budget far beyond what I have access to. I’m interested in the strange space between film, digital collage, fashion editorial, miniature worlds, speculative fiction and old television. The artificiality is intentional. I want the world to feel glossy, synthetic, tactile and slightly unreal. somewhere between a 1950s future, a 1990s toy commercial, a fashion campaign and a sitcom from a timeline that never happened. This is not me trying to argue that generated characters should replace actors, costume designers, set builders, cinematographers or any of the people who make television extraordinary. Quite the opposite: I would love to see Strange in the City eventually made with real human performers and a real creative team. These shorts are a way to make the world visible now — to prototype the characters, tone, stories, sets and visual language and see what the show could become. For now, this is the strange little version I can make myself.