Set a Episodic series, a la The West Wing or Twin Peaks, in 'ETopia' demonstrating the very real problems, successes, inter-personal foo-foo, external conflicts, & etc and how the community deals with them, or fails to deal with them. Perhaps intermixing "Reality footage" with the "Fictional footage?"
I freely admit I know very little about the actuality of show business but it seems to me the primary 'hump' a mass media show needs to get over is audience identification and emotional involvement with the characters.
So ...
Perhaps Northern Exposure's sense of life, sitz im leben, would be a better paradigm?
And, taking off from something ceeb suggested, as a tie-in create a Second Life virtual reality that viewers could join (for a fee?) so they could interact with the show?
You could set it in New Mexico and star a grumpy applied epistemologist. :-0
