Cue the laugh track

In honor of the new fall TV season, I’ve been developing a show of my own.

It’s called “BFF,” which is the text-messaging term for Best Friend Forever. You hear BFF everywhere now, in cellphone commercials, on TV shows, in everyday conversation. Since this phenomenon is so prevalent and annoying, it’s a natural for a laugh-tracky new sitcom.

“You’re my BFF,” the little guy says.

“You’re my BFF too,” I tell him right back.

See, that’s how it works. Till recently, I’ve never been a big believer in friendship. Now I believe that friends can be worthwhile, even enjoyable.

“BFF” will star Greg Kinnear as me, a guy in search of a best friend who instead ends up married and living in the suburbs with his four children, none of whom like him very much, unless it’s Friday night and they need money for Starbucks or some insipid Dane Cook movie.

When that’s the case, they’ll come slinking around with their hands out and smiling like Ryan Seacrest. In fact, Seacrest will probably star as one of the children. Probably the oldest daughter, lovely and patient.

“Hey, Daddy,” Seacrest will say, “can you please pay my rent this month?”

This stuff just writes itself. The little girl, meanwhile, will be played by Little Red Riding Hood (out of work since the ‘60s), who will flounce around in too-tight jeans, screaming, “MY PRINTER DOESN’T WORK! MY PRINTER DOESN’T WORK!” The boy will be played by the Big Bad Wolf, who usually won’t audition but we’ll insist.

The little guy? He’ll be played by the little guy himself, who, like me, can’t distinguish between TV and real life, so we’ll be able to sign him very, very cheap. My wacky, fun-loving friends Paul and Don? Tim Conway and Mandy Patinkin. They’ll be married -- you know, to give it the “edge” today’s TV requires.

And that’s our little show. Oh, wait, I forgot to cast my wife. Is Ingrid Bergman available? What about Hepburn? Either Audrey or Kate will do.

Whoever it is, she’d need to have a smile like sunlight through a wineglass and the sense of smell of a fine chocolatier. My wife, she’s always smelling things I can’t. Faint little personal gases and dead things under the house. It’s like she has an extra nose somewhere.

“Maybe Dana Delany,” I say.

“Maybe what?” she asks.

“To play you on TV,” I say.

I like to toss it out there, the long-shot notion that my wife will soon be the subject of a prime-time show. She seems so depressed lately. Each morning, I can see the fatigue in her face, a melancholy that sweeps across her pretty jaw line like moon shadow.

It’s caused by the mind-numbing vocals of yet another early-morning children’s show. The Wiggles, of course, are the worst -- four metrosexuals in “Star Trek” shirts who look like they’ve had too much Thorazine. Our parents had Sinatra. We have the Wiggles.

“It’s a Wiggily party. . . . “ they sing over and over and over and over and over and over, till God gets a migraine.

“I really need a vacation,” my wife said the other morning.

“Like I don’t need a vacation?”

“You’re part of the reason I need a vacation,” she explained.

See, that’s the sort of conflict TV producers love. It springs naturally from the profound relationship my wife and I have established in our 78-year marriage. We can talk about almost anything. In the show, as in life, she’s my BFF and I don’t even realize it.

In fact, the other morning I confessed that I liked to get down to the doughnut shop early, in order to see other pretty moms dash inside in their pajamas. That discussion alone could be a three-episode arc. And maybe a who-done-it cliffhanger, based on how she almost tried to garrote me later that same day with a string of her mother’s pearls.

“Don’t you have any other ideas?” she says, when I explain the doughnut shop episode.

“Later, I thought I’d play some checkers,” I say.

“No, I mean for a TV show?”

“What TV show?”

Like I said, this stuff just writes itself. Can’t you imagine America tuning in each week to watch some old-fashioned father try to find true friendship in a family more interested in iPods, cellphones and the creeps they meet on Facebook?

Move over, “American Idol.” This is pure Shakespeare.

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Chris Erskine can be reached at [email protected].