In this episode, we trend towards making these shows marketable. From gym entrepreneurship to selling sex(lessness) to reaching an Indian audience, I guess we're actually starting to think about the step after a show is made: Who watches this stuff? I hope it's a trend that does not continue. We shouldn't be constrained by the whims of a disgusting audience.

Calling all nature lovers - we really take our time devouring the profession of naturopathy. You'd think we had a grudge against it, but in fact the only grudge we have is against the concept of character comedies. And that's why our second pitch has patently zero character development, with a complete smash cut reset of all character arcs every episode. Our final pitch involves Britain's grumpiest chef, America's most diminutive rapper, a ring of child gambling, and everyone is NOW DEFENSELESS and mentally DEFEATED.

Spade's back baby! David returns to revive his most lauded role in an already much-lauded career. His family loves scandal and rumour-mongering. Then we bounce around how a person would spend their lottery bucks - with money as the wedge in our second show's family relationships. The final family drama revolves around the most universal point of conflict for a family: Roger "Good Tennis Boy" Federer.

After an ernest discussion about ernestness in television, we begin our pitches in ernest. And what a skip's scramble we've got for you. The menu includes an appetiser of two culturally superior idiots, followed by a main course of explosive heart syndrome. And for desert, we have the Simpson (you thought I'd misspelled dessert huh?), which is the filming location of the final pitch. What a stretch.

Weirdly we both converge on pitches involving impersonation. We discuss impersonation etiquette, impersonator skin-wearing techniques, how to replace a family with impersonators. But most importantly, Sherlock and Moriarty battle wits in the ultimate showdown, as diminutive scholars riding megafauna.

Our favourite Hot Wok Jungle Noodle Bar is immortalised in television history, as we inject its head chef into a MacGyveresque role. This provokes the Rake Dilemma: What unspeakable things are left to use as story material, if you can't use anything in the first season of Rake? The answer to this is vitally important to figuring out what The Incident could be.

In fact, we use this concept of A Magnificent Event, or an Unspeakable Incident, so much in our body of work, that this podcast should really be re-titled Managing Expectations. 

Speaking of titles, this is the LAST reference to the podcast being Professional Friends. If you heard the phrase "Professional Friends" three times or more in this episode, then the Ring girl will come for you tonight. Happy Halloween!

Muses for this episode include a REAL family of Italian ex-royals, a REAL priest that murders his way across New Zealand (inasmuch as priests are real), and a REAL pair of friends combined from popular franchises (inasmuch as friendships can be real). It's proof that life can be stranger than fiction sometimes! 

And almost for the last time, publisher's note: We do keep saying the title of the podcast is "Professional Friends", but I cannot stress enough that it's a fun prank. Professional Friends is an existing IP, and we do not have the rights to it. And if you think we do, then you fell for the prank.

This one's got legs - a tangled mess of octopus legs that grab at any idea that comes along. And boy, there's some TV classics getting snared in our octopus web today. Do you think a spider and an octopus could survive if they switched places? TM. 

On that note, we pitch: a Trading Places for a dead jazz musician; a unicorn start-up idea thinly veiled as a feel-good Offspringesque Aussie dramedy; and a gossipy village soap opera, starring a halfling and an actual invincible alien god. 

Don't bother Googling "octopus vs. spider", you just get that battle from Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man 2.

If you could go back in time and kill - no wait - seduce Hitler, how many times would you do it? 10? 1000? A notorious romantic, we posit a world where history's bad-boy is out-romanced by our main character in order to avert a genocide. Would it alienate an audience? More importantly, will our discussing it alienate our audience? These, and many other questions (e.g. How do you build a Handmaid's Tale Semen-milking Machine? How do you make a hundred boring people's lives watchable? Can you secretly film The Biggest Loser and brand it as your own TV show?) will be raised and frustratingly left unanswered in this, another installment, of Steamy Potential.

This week, as we do every year (only this year for the first time we recorded the audio), we compete against each other for most Emmy-able TV show. And, as we do every year, we realise we don't quite know the rules of the competition. Aside from that, the Emmy showdown pitches Nic's blade-running fall-guy, coming-of-age, reality-show with its cast of huge stars against Dan's single half-baked premise: what if there were more than one Hugh Grant?

Who will take home the coveted Golden Pitch, win the big race, and get back in time to save the Shire from Orcs? Vote for your favourite Emmy-bait idea on our Instagram (@steamypotentialpodcast), using the voting... functions...