By no dint of my own doing, it couldn’t have been a more well-timed pitch for network television.

Three weeks I’d been preparing for the trip to L.A., fleshing out the premise, characters, and pilot storyline for a show about the world of first responders to natural disasters. I’d even come up with a title that excited me after the initial void of not having one, titles often being the starter culture in my creative process: Aftermath.

So when New York City experienced a minor but freakish earthquake ten days before my departure, I felt the jolt of relevance more so than I did anything seismic.

Then came the warnings about Hurricane Irene.

Freakish, yes, for one to hit New York in its path; but minor, no, as the warnings grew more dire over the course of the coming week. Evacuation plans for the city’s flood zones were in effect, the airports bound to shut down before my scheduled Sunday departure.

Soon enough, with all manner of uncanniness, it looked like my trip to L.A. might end up a temporary casualty of the coming storm. The synchronicity was beginning to feel like a headline in The Onion: “L.A.-bound Writer with Idea for a Show about Natural Disasters Forced by Irene to ‘Keep it Real’ in New York.”

Not only did I manage to make it out that Saturday instead, though, but on the last flight out before J.F.K. and other airports shut down in advance of the storm’s arrival.

This preamble to the trip would make for a great preamble in the coming pitches:

“Well, it isn’t every week that an earthquake or a hurricane hit New York, let alone both back-to-back, so I feel like Mother Nature has taken a seat on the couch here….”

Or:

“I discovered this week a certain disturbing similarity between waiting for a hurricane and waiting for a pitch: you’re prepared, you’ve battened down the hatches and even bought a generator, but still, you just don’t know how it’s going to turn out….”

Then there was a front-page story in the L.A. Times the week before I left, detailing the country’s extreme weather crisis thus far in 2011. Over 800 tornado reports in the month of April alone. Droughts and floods nearly adjacent to one another in neighboring states. Blizzards, wildfires, a dust storm that rolled over Phoenix like something from a sci-fi film. All told, $35 billion in damage thus far, already seven times the annual average before Irene hit.

As various climatologists interviewed for the article said, a world of increasing, and increasingly severe, natural disasters seemed poised to be “the new normal.”

The proverbial pump could not have been better primed when I walked into those rooms at two of the five broadcast networks to pitch Aftermath.

Nevertheless, both passed.

The pitches themselves could not have gone better, of that I am sure. My producing partners on the project assured me the same, as did even certain network executives in their follow-up with my agents.

But no is no, and that was that.

It’s always a crapshoot in this business, but what upset me most was the crappy reasoning given by one executive for his network’s pass: the show seemed a bit depressing, in that the first responders go home after their short-term rescue-and-recovery efforts, while the victims are left behind in their damaged lives.

Sorry? People who have been brought to their knees by hurricanes, tornadoes, and the like are saved from further trauma, put on the road to recovery and left in the hands of longer-term relief efforts, and that’s depressing?

Is it not depressing when the loved ones of a murder victim in every cop show out there have to go on bereft despite justice being served—often served as it is with a winner’s shot of whiskey for the cops?

Dinosaurs, Playboy Bunnies, and yesteryear’s flight attendants, in; the victims of natural disasters and those who put themselves on the line to help devastated strangers, out.

Given the initial low ratings of “The Playboy Club” and “Pan Am,” though, after their recent premieres, these two series may be out, too, in the weeks ahead. Not in a million years would the networks have picked up period shows as these two, then along came “Mad Men” and they scrambled to follow suit.

Perhaps I should have made my first responders a team of undercover vampires — wolves in sheep’s clothing out to victimize the victims!

(There just might be a hit in that, come to think of it…)

While it’s probably not so wise of me to kvetch and talk shop like this in a public forum, for now I’ll have to bank on the fact that after sixty posts and counting here at Good Letters, I have yet to cross paths with anyone in the business who has said, “Hey, are you the guy who blogs on faith and art at the Image website?”

Watch, now I’m in for it, having just said that.

But all the better, by my lights, if it makes for any kind of honest conversation. Because one of the things I loved most about the potential show was that it tackles the matter of collective experience in America — collective tragedy and collective triumph in a culture that is so defined by the ethos of individual suffering and individual victory.

And given the present state of our economy in which so many people find themselves in the same boat, I thought the idea might provide a fitting metaphor and lens in which not only to refract the more unnatural disasters that loom large at the moment — financially, politically, etc.—but to show that the road to recovery is a collective one.

The game isn’t altogether over yet, as my producing partners at the studio may want me to write a spec script of the pilot anyway, to be shopped around elsewhere and afresh.

Who knows, in the aftermath I may just get to write Aftermath after all.