You’re traveling through another neighborhood, a neighborhood built from a maze of zoning-board restrictions. A journey into a redlined land whose boundaries are the imagination of cranky homeowners and bored busybodies. That’s the signpost up ahead. Your next stop: the Twilight Zoning Board.
Episode 1:
“The Man in the Bottle”
A genie grants four wishes to a pawnbroker and his wife. They use the wishes to be approved for a commercial zoning variance, a land-use study, a water and sewage application, and a lawyer to help with the thirteen additional permits they need to open a second location.
Episode 2:
“King Nine Will Not Return”
The sole survivor of a World War II bomber crash cannot find any trace of his crew, but he does see jet planes flying overhead, because the city allows apartment buildings to be built only near the noisy airport, away from single-family homes.
Episode 3:
“The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine”
An aging movie star rewatches her old films in an attempt to recapture her youth. She can’t watch them at the cinema because burdensome parking mandates make it financially impossible to open a small repertory movie theater.
Episode 4:
“Perchance to Dream”
A man with a severe heart condition who has been awake for a long time tells his psychiatrist that he will die if he goes to sleep because a vixen is trying to kill him for suggesting duplexes be legal downtown. The psychiatrist declares him insane and has him committed for the most obvious sign of psychosis: suggesting duplexes be legal downtown.
Episode 5:
“The Whole Truth”
A used-car dealer is forced to reveal the truth after selling a car to an old man, who claims the vehicle is haunted. There isn’t a ghost in the car, but instead a college student living in it after residents sued the local university to block more student housing.
Episode 6:
“The Night of the Meek”
A drunken department-store Santa Claus is fired by his boss on Christmas Eve, and then finds a sack that gives people anything they want. Unfortunately, everyone wants a six-bedroom single-family home in the center of Manhattan, causing the entire island to sink into the sea in a whirlpool of white picket fences and aggrieved editorials in the Post.
Episode 7:
“The Silence”
An aristocratic club member bets that a talkative acquaintance cannot stay silent for an entire year. The aristocrat says the words “low-income housing” and wins the bet after seven seconds.
Episode 8:
“The Four of Us Are Dying”
A small-time con man with the ability to change his face assumes the identities of a musician, a gangster, and a boxer. All three times, he’s forced to give up his career dreams in order to work overtime in the gig economy and afford rent in his supply-constrained city.
