The Triumph of "Nobody's Watching"!
Posted July 21st, 2006 by RD Heldenfels
Score one for YouTube: NBC is going to make webisodes and develop new TV scripts for "Nobody's Watching," the Bill Lawrence-backed comedy originally planned for The WB. The hope is to start it as a prime-time series later in the 2006-07 season. (You can find the complete announcement here.)
As I mentioned in this blog (see the late-June post "Hurry…") and in the Beacon Journal, The WB did not pick up the series but the pilot ended up on YouTube, where it gained a lot of fans, with almost 400,000 views of the first part of the pilot as of this morning. Based on that buzz, Lawrence began talking to reporters, including me, and the show once again caught the networks' attention. Which is good news, because the pilot — about two guys from Ohio given a chance to make their own TV comedy — was hilarious.
The webisodes should start within a month, says NBC Entertainment President Kevin Reilly. The guys from the show are already out and about in Hollywood, Reilly said, and may pop up at all sorts of show-biz events in the days ahead.
July 21st, 2006 at 11:12 am
This is great news, and only accentuates how out-of-touch with viewers the post-Jamie Kellner WB program-evaluators were. Nobody's Watching would've hit the network's younger demo perfectly. Instead, we got Melanie Griffith and Fran Drescher in rather embarrasing series. How funny that one reason given for "Nobody's" non-pickup was that execs feared it would be too hard for viewers to understand. That's laughable, in itself!
On an ABC note, after reading the cast list from Patricia Heaton's failed-pilot, and seeing what other "comedies" the network picked up…I'm truly shocked. There's not a single hit among the 4 sitcoms ABC chose, and no matter how slow Heaton's show would be in finding its legs, they had proven, funny, popular comedians there. ABC missed the boat on this one, as they do with so, so many of their comedies. Another year of "Jim" and "Lopez"…oh joy.
July 21st, 2006 at 12:09 pm
I haven't seen Heaton's pilot, so I can't comment on it. But don't write off ABC's comedies entirely. "Knights of Prosperity" (formerly "Let's Rob …") has real possibilities, a solid cast and a hilarious first-episode cameo by Mick Jagger. And "Ugly Betty," already getting well-buzzed, has plenty of comedy in its promising pilot, as well as a breakout star in America Ferrera. (You can find my column about it elsewhere on ohio.com.)