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.

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.

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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