Pilot Review – Nobody's Watching

Something funny happened on the Internet recently. Unfortunately, the funny thing wasn’t Nobody\’s Watching. Instead, it was YouTube once again legitimising the spread of illegal content.

The past ten years have seen troubled waters for “traditional” media companies. Old distribution methods have been questioned by consumers eager to increase and expand their access to content via the Internet. Television and Music distributors had finally begun to wrap their mind around how to begin generating revenue from downloads when the status quo flipped once more on them with YouTube, the Internet’s current wunderkind.

YouTube’s official reason for being seemed to be for people to trade stupid home videos with each other. Unofficially it is a haven for television oddities, such as lost TV pilots, trailers, and the outright bizarre.

After the WB and NBC both passed on Nobody’s Watching, the WB production found itself being posted on YouTube where, at time of publication, the first segment of the pilot had been viewed 185,352 times within two weeks. While the pilot has already gathered a strong legion of fans, it’s not really all that surprising that the pilot was never picked up. The show simply isn’t that funny and would have been a horrible ratings disaster.

So, what’s it about?
The shows one strength is simply that it had an amazingly good idea at its core. Two twenty-something guys have cultivated a life-long friendship based on their love of US sitcoms. They produce a video essay for the WB expressing their dismay at the poor quality of sitcoms on television. The WB retaliate by hiring them to star in a reality show focussing on their attempts to produce a sitcom. Most of the series then takes place on a sitcom set that is to be their creative hub as they start work on producing their sitcom. The show is part sitcom/part reality television mockumentary.

Who’s in the darn thing?
Eh, no one particularly good or well known. The two unknown protagonists seem to be doing their best Ryan Reynolds impersonation for the duration of the show. Mostly, it just comes off as an even worse version of last years failed sitcom Life On A Stick.

I’ll give the show props however for some great sitcom cameo’s.

What happens in the crucial first episode?
Mostly the pilot sets up the premise for the series by introducing the characters to the reality show format. In an ode to the sitcom format, a sub-plot develops that forces the two protagonists to honour their friendship despite the hurdles that lie before them, in this case network executives.

Is it any good?
I really wish I could say yes, but it’s just so poorly executed. While I appreciate the post-modern approach to the series and its novel execution, the writing in the pilot just isn’t all that great. The bad writing is hampered by wooden and overtly sitcom-like performances from the cast. Of which may be the point, but it doesn’t really lead to particularly entertaining television. It’s disappointing when you consider that it’s from Bill Lawrence, the creator of the highly inventive and funny series Scrubs.