Brick Mason Shopping Cart Detective

Not every TV show makes it to the big time. More often than cost-conscious TV execs like to think about, TV shows join the discard pile of broadcast history without an audience seeing even one episode.

Although consolidation, cost-cutting, and profit mongering have diminished the number of TV pilots and shows produced, there are still shows – like the misfit toys in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer – that are never seen.

One show pilot produced in 2025 was particularly promising. It was called Brick Mason, Shopping Cart Detective.

Produced by Irvington Motor Lodge Productions and developed by Thrillionaire Gene Baker, the show introduced us to a job for the 21st century – a shopping cart detective.

In the pilot, we are introduced to Brick Mason, a middle-aged mortgage broker who suddenly found himself out of a job when his employer, an unscrupulous (is there any other kind?) mortgage company, went bankrupt during the 2008 economic crisis. Mason, deep in credit card debt and with a home that rivaled the HGTV dream home, quickly lost everything and ended up in the Maryland suburbs in the basement of his sister’s home. Since his sister’s husband was arrested for having sex with the underage Salvadoran maid, Brick was expected to help out with expenses.

Since then, he has drifted through a series of jobs, from Extended Vehicle Warranty general manager for the East Northwestern Region of Car Shlock-A to an almost certified Zamboni mechanic.

Then, after a decade of easy-come, easy-get fired jobs, Brick Mason found the jobs of his dreams – Shopping Cart Detective. The job enabled him to carry a large flashlight – the length of one of those min-bats you can buy in a museum gift shop – and wear a uniform.

Brick Mason is tall with taut muscles from years of working out with a personal trainer at an exclusive Manhattan gym. His deep black hair and his trimmed beard stubble project cool masculinity. His eyes radiate shark-like intelligence, and his smile imparts an acute sense of empathy buried by years of scamming people with mortgages and homes they could never afford.

Disgraced and jobless after being fired at his latest job as an omelet chef at a high-end resort due to calling anyone who ordered a goat cheese omelet a goat serial killer, Mason was shoplifting, I mean shopping, at a local Mal-Mart for food when he noticed a large sign that requested shoppers not to take shopping carts off the property. Then Mason hit upon an idea. He would start his own business finding these stray shopping carts and returning them to the store for a finder’s fee.

After this setup, Mason meets with the local Mal-Mart store manager, whose greed is surpassed only by his Martha Stewart toupee, handwoven by members of a Mexican drug cartel who have decided to go straight.

Four carts have gone missing, and the Mal-Mart manager at the Ocean City store, Benjy Bernanke, wants Brick Mason to find them.

Mason takes the job and quickly solves the mystery of three missing shopping carts, using Facebook, paper clips doubling as house keys, and a non-stick cooking surface to apprehend three town council members who were using the carts to haul bribe money they received from local contractors.

Mason quickly learns from a shopping-cart informant—a recently fired Amazon worker who was caught whizzing on a portrait of Jeff Bezos —that a homeless woman took the cart. When Mason finds her with the cart under a highway overpass with her meager belongings (including a pregnant cat) in the cart, Mason hands her a $100 Mal-Mart gift card he had palmed when talking to the store manager. She hugs him when she realizes that he will let her keep the shopping cart.

When Brick Mason collects his fee for finding three of the four shopping carts, the store manager questions him about the fourth cart.

“I looked everywhere, Bernanke,” Mason says. “It’s not a catastrophe,” Mason emphasizes and laughs winsomely while the store manager scowls and goes back to plotting his latest layoffs.

In the last sequence of the pilot, the informant, now working at FanDuel as a “collections agent,” told Mason’s sister, Meghan, that Brick had helped the homeless woman.

When Brick Mason came home from the Mal-Mart that day, his sister hugged him.

“The brother I used to know is back,” she whispered to him.

The final scene of the pilot shows two terrorists stealing three shopping carts from a Torget parking lot. The camera focuses on a terrorist who aims a bomb at a shopping cart as target practice for a more insidious plot.

The audience now knows that Brick Mason, shopping cart detective, will save them from terrorists, thieves, and corrupt politicians in subsequent shows.

Why did network and cable execs pass on the show?

“Shopping cart theft is like abortion, evolution, and gay marriage,” responded the anonymous exec. “It’s just too controversial a topic in this country right now. Maybe HBO can take it on.”

For now, Brick Mason, Shopping Cart Detective, remains the best show you’ve never seen.