I’ve long had a question niggling at the back of my mind: “If I could go back in time to my younger self and give him some much needed, what would I say?”
That question eventually prompted me to create Saving Me for BYUtv. At the core of the question is regret. What wrong would I try to undo? What mistake would I try to avoid? What character flaw would I try to shore up before it metastasizes into a deep personal weakness or, worse, a version of myself that I hadn’t wanted to become.
Saving Me is of course of comedy, but its foundation is a true tragedy. It is, after all, a story about pain and sorrow and loss and realizing too late in life that we have fallen short of who we wanted to be in the end. But it couldn’t be a downer. It needed to be fun and a little uncomfortably honest. At its core, the show follows Bennett Bramble—an 11-year-old kid with a big brain and even bigger blind spots—who suddenly finds himself being mentored by his future self. The twist is that Future Bennett has turned into a wildly successful tech billionaire who’s miserably lonely and wracked with guilt at the terrible choices he’s made in life. Basically, he’s the world’s biggest jerk and has burned every bridge to everyone who means anything to him. So he builds a time machine of sorts and goes back to “fix” his younger self. Of course, since he’s already lost touch with what it means to be a good person, his advice tends to make things worse before they get better. Cue the comedy.
What I enjoy about the series is that underneath all the gadgets, time travel, and chaos, it’s really about learning how to be the best version of ourselves. Each episode lets us explore that in a different way, usually through one of Young Bennett’s inventions or schemes that spirals out of control. But by the end, there’s always some kind of hard-earned insight about friendship, empathy, or owning your mistakes.
I got to work with an incredible group of people, including producers and writers and animators and artists, who helped bring this thing to life. I made many dear friends. Some will be friends for life, people I can turn to when I grow old and ask, “So how’d I’d do after all these years?” And they, like all good friends do, will tell me the truth.