I know some people who live in an exclusive area of Long Island, and they love sailing. So, naturally, they own a sailboat. They bought their summer house there where it is years and years ago, and they really wanted to join the local yacht club, but it was completely full with all the membership that was available, and the situation was such that there was a long waiting list to join the club, and another member literally would have to die in order for the club to accept in any new members. And everybody with a boat really wanted to join this yacht club a lot.
Well, eventually, after waiting for like twenty years, the people I know were finally able to join, and as far as I know, the situation is basically still the same, with the yacht club membership being completely full, necessitating current members to die in order to admit new members, and there is currently an even longer list than there was twenty years ago of people who really, really, really want to join this particular yacht club. And this gave me an idea for a mystery series, like the ones on Masterpiece Mystery, only American.
So basically, the set-up would be the same as that stated above, with a very exclusive yacht club that everybody wants to join, but there is no room for new members until someone dies. And then the area where the yacht club is becomes even more ritzy as a bunch of power players and pillars of industry move there and build enormous mansions and such. Well, they bring their wonderful, exquisite, exorbitantly-priced yachts, but there's still no room for new members at the yacht club. So these guys offer to build a new clubhouse, buy more property for the club, buy a cutting-edge racing sailboat for the club (which has a prestigious history of winning sailing cup races and so forth), but the answer is still "no". And these are not the kinds of guys who are accustomed to being told "no". (Some of these guys even try to get together to buy enough waterfront property to build their own yacht club, but there is no property available with the correct zoning for permitting a yacht club, and the city council that decides is populated by members of the extant yacht club, and they're not about to allow another yacht club permission to compete with them. {But the cultured people among this group of yacht club wait list wannabes want to join the existing yacht club for the prestige and tradition anyway, so a new yacht club would not do for their purposes at all.})
And so these guys have to wait for someone to die in order for them to be able to join the yacht club. And then, all of a sudden, yacht club members begin dying in mysterious ways, most of which are related to yachting: keel hauling, tied to the mast on an overturned sailboat, killed in an engine explosion aboard their power boat, gone down with the ship when a large leak developed, etc. And a local police officer (this being a small hamlet of working class locals who live there year round with a majority of the homes being summer homes {mansions, really} for rich New York City people) has to untangle the web of intrigue in order to solve the crimes, which he does so by acting sufficiently like a local yokel for the rich power brokers to underestimate and look down upon him, and so they let slip various boating related details they wouldn't suspect this guy to be bright or alert enough to notice (they don't know this guy is an avid sailing enthusiast, but he can't afford a nice sailboat or afford the yacht club, so he just has a teensy little sailboat moored by a local hardware store; but he reads lots and lots of books about sailing all the time), and eventually he pieces together each and every crime one-by-one, apprehending the killers, and revealing the motives.
And there would be a new 90 minute show each week, and everyone killed would be some rich Wall Street investment banker, corporate lawyer, or political lobbyist type, and every killer would be someone else like that as well, so lots of people might be interested in watching the show, especially after the financial crash, the mortgage meltdown, the foreclosure scandals, all the political corruption lately, etc. And the heroes would be the local hardworking policemen and the local community that make the wheels go 'round in this community. But we'd also have plenty of nice rich characters too, many of them yacht racing types, and they go into lots of sailing stuff in the show as well, showing off the beautiful yacht club location and all the wonderful yachts and racing sailboats. And there would also be the young people who come to sail as the racing crew and the people who come for the summer to work at the yacht club, which is mainly a seasonal affair. So it would have something for everyone, unless they hate boating and lovely seaside views.
