YouTube Revives Failed Sitcom Pilot

Vary Krishna writes ""Nobody's Watching", a pilot made for last year's upfronts that was never picked up, is being put back into development by NBC after gaining attention on YouTube. From the ZapTV article: "I love the spirit of the experimentation," NBC Entertainment president Kevin Reilly says. "And I think if we can actually have something find an audience on the web, gravitate over to the network, continue with a web presence and have them feed each other, that could end up being a really cool thing." Where was this guy last year?"

Comments

It's well-deserved...

[Stick_Fig]

...this pilot is hilarious. It twists the conventions of sitcoms multiple ways, turns the studio audience into a plot device, turns the guest stars into pathetic parodies of themselves, makes fun of other sitcoms that suck, and even trashes the just-don't-get-it higher-ups, the race for both ratings and vicious critics (the title spawns a pretty good joke).

This show has great pedigree due to the fact that its creator is also responsible for "Spin City" and "Scrubs," and is totally worth your time. Thank God YouTube got it before "Brilliant But Cancelled" did.

It's about intelligence..

[plasmacutter]

Once a show caters to people above a certain level of intelligence, they don't fall for the ads/marketing.. sponsors refuse to pay for the airtime.

Basic story.. "fake it" by buying the products or at least inquiring.. and if enough people fake it theyll continue paying for the ads.. the show stays on the air =)

Where he was last year

[SuperBanana]

Where was this guy last year?

The link from the editor points to a slashdot story about "Global Frequency", which after getting leaked, becoming very popular on the interbutt, and supposedly "picked up", was so successful...

absolutely nothing happened and the series still hasn't been produced, and likely never will be. The slashdot editor implies that getting leaked to BitTorrent resulted in it turning into a real series, or at least some additional episodes were produced. Absolutely nothing of the sort happened, and the series had already been considered a shoe-in for production before it was leaked.

Re:Arrested Development?

[kimvette]

yes but not until the end of 2007 or the beginning of 2008, and even then possibly not for a full season but somewhere between 13 and 15 episodes, and no word on the previously-announced direct-to-dvd movies. Some speculation is that the movies will be chopped up into tv episodes.

Wow, that was bad. IMHO.

[Alsee]

I RTFA & WTFV (Watched The Fine Videos).

This is not clever-cheezy like some good sitcoms. These are not clever jokes arising out of humorously stupid characters. The entire show is just "we're doing a lame job of pretending to be lame and you're supposed to laugh because we're telling you that we're pretending to be lame". Not funny-cheezy performances, just lame-trying-to-be-cheezy. And that is all there is to the show.

It's not even funny in an inside joke "we-both-know-I'm-pretending-to-make-a-show" way. It's not an inside joke when they spend half the time blatantly and clumsly violating the premise and explaining to you that what the inside joke is supposed to be.

One characteristicly geek form of humor is meta-humor. Subtle and sophisticated meta-humor. This show takes the meta-concept and dumbs it down to the lowest possible common denominator for a beer guzzling houseplant to be able to say "oooh I get it! Everything sucks because they are pretending to suck! Pretending to be a sitcom about a sitcom! Wow it goes around like a round thing!".

This is we-think-you-are-stupid-so-we-avoid-clever-jokes-a nd-we-explain-the-joke-to-you-in-case-you-didn't-g et-it unfunny. This is telling you we're going to make a joke about X, then making the unclever joke X, and then explaining to you why you were supposed to laugh.

The gag of deliberately adding a "token black" to the all-white show should have been very funny, but nooooo, they first had to sit there explaining the joke to us before cutting to the scene of 20 black-only candidates for the position. Yeah, jokes are so much funnier when you stop to explain them first.

I think I lost IQ points just by watching it.

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Re:Wow, that was bad. IMHO.

[Bender_]

I second that. I only managed to sit through the first part of the show on youtube. I would have expected to see comments more negative comments on slashdot. But then - you can never underestimate the slashdot crowd.

Oh C'mon guys

[hey!]

Can't you spot viral marketing yet?

The show pretty much has one shtick: trying get a laugh out of phoney self-references. It's like exploiting an worn out oil field; they're trying to pump laughs out of the old gags, and top that off with gags about how old the old gags are, and since that is getting old itself, probably gags about how gags about old gags are old.

The executives at WB are characters in the show. Or rather, characters in the show play WB executives who will resort to any underhanded ploy to promote the show. So the "executives" at WB cancel the show, only to have YouTube revive it; it's a plot line.

The pilot is funny -- for about five minutes. That's the difference between YouTube and TV; TV has to make something you want to tune into week after week. By in large TV fails. The Internet provides the opportunity for "All Your Base" kind of phenomena to spread, but not necessarily to command a half hour of your time (with advertisements) a couple of dozen times a year.