Genre: TV Pilot – Sitcom
Premise: A 30-something writer for an outdoors magazine suffers an injury that forces him to work back at the company offices, where the magazine is run by a bunch of delicate millennials with zero outdoors experience.
About: This is a new sitcom coming to CBS which snagged the most in-demand comedy talent on the 2016 market in Community star Joel McHale. McHale will be joined by McLovin who is mclovin the fact that he’s finally got a job.
Writer/Creator: Mike Gibbons
Details: 46 pages
As those of you who follow me on Twitter know, Joel McHale and I are workout buddies. And by workout buddies I mean we work out at the same gym (Gold’s Hollywood if anyone wants to join us) and occasionally use machines that are in close proximity to one another.
Okay, if we’re being totally honest, this proximity thing has only happened a couple of times. But there was one time when Joel was walking towards me and smiled in such a way that it was either meant for me or the guy behind me. Which it’s fair to say can be counted as a half-smile towards me. Which basically means we’re best friends.
In all seriousness, after a few complaints in the comments section of Pilot Submission Saturday, I felt bad that I didn’t choose a single half-hour comedy. In my defense, I don’t understand the appeal of shows like The Big Bang Theory or Mom. And a lot of that comes from the fact that the half-hour comedy has evolved out of the 3-camera format into something more creative, thanks to shows like The Office, Modern Family, and Community.
So consider today’s a review a test. Because I LOVE the talent involved in today’s pilot. You have my buddy Joel McHale. You have McLovin, who’s so cool that his famous character is just as popular today as it was ten years ago. And you have Mike Gibbons.
Now Gibbons is a name you probably don’t know yet but you should. He’s the head writer on the best late night show on television, the amazing James Corden show (if you haven’t watched it yet, do so tonight. I guarantee it’ll bring a smile to your face).
All of this is a long-winded way of saying if TODAY’S script doesn’t win me over, then no multi-camera sit com is going to do so. Because I love what all these guys bring to the table. So grab your tea-coffee chais and your bacon-maple donuts you hipsters, and join me for a plot breakdown that I pray I’ll like.
35 year-old Joel (yes, the character Joel plays is also named “Joel”) has been forced into a position he promised himself he’d never be in – taking a desk job. It’s not Joel’s fault. He was out climbing the world’s tallest mountain when a bad fall messed up his leg, ending his mountain-climbing career instantly.
To make matters worse, Joel works at an outdoors magazine run by 20-something hipster douches whose idea of mountain climbing is clicking through Yelp reviews of restaurants that are on a hill. In a world where Joel wants to write serious articles about running out of oxygen at 25,000 feet, his hipster cohorts would rather write about the five best mountain-climbing tools to have should the zombie apocalypse arrive.
All the garden-variety sit-com tropes are in place, like the female lead whose only job it is to inject sexual tension into each episode. Oh, and let’s not forget the token black friend who lets our hero stay at his place while he gets back on his feet (except for the days when he’s Air BnB’ing his house!).
Despite the fact that when you take the ‘i’ out of ‘pilot’ you’re left with ‘plot,’ I couldn’t find anything resembling such a thing in this episode. There may have been a magazine-wide pitch due at the end of the show but you’d be hard pressed to point out where they set this up.
In the end, despite Joel hating his new job, he decides to give it a shot because if he doesn’t there wouldn’t be a show. Which, to be honest, probably would’ve been better for his career. I know that CBS is the only network that still understands the classic sit-com format. But I’d be surprised if even they could make this one work.
One of the terrible things about sit-coms is that when they’re bad, theyre realllllly bad. As in they go south faster than a Irish woman on St. Patty’s day. Something about the fact that you’re hearing laughter when things are so clearly unfunny makes how not-funny they are even more noticeable.
Did you ever watch that awful Sean Hayes sitcom from a year ago? And how bout that Mark Paul Gossler sitcom about married life that came and went faster than a Sascha Baron Cohen opening weekend? The Great Indoors feels like a combination of those two shows.
And it’s driving me crazy trying to figure out why my workout buddy agreed to do this. This is a man who participated in one of the most edgy comedies of the last half-decade. And now he’s doing traditional sit-coms?? That’s like racking a three-plate bench press then going to the warm-up area to do push-ups.
There was only one joke in the entire script that I hadn’t seen before, and that’s when Joel had to go to HR for making a millennial cry. Laughter had become such a foreign concept during this read, that I immediately felt guilty for doing so, sort of like I’d just giggled at a crippled man who’d fallen out of his wheelchair.
A big reason for the lack of laughter came from how lame these characters were. One of the things I always push upon writers is that you want to create three-dimensional characters. These characters were the antithesis of this. They were one-dimensional to the core. As in you pick one trait per character and hit on it over and over and over again until you want to stick your forehead in a 1920s printing press.
And look, one of my favorite shows ever was Seinfeld. Those characters were pretty one-dimensional themselves. But at least that show was trying to do something different! It didn’t follow the traditional sit-com format. It centered on the minutia of everyday life. This meant that at least one aspect of the show was taking us into unfamiliar territory.
The Great Indoors is a premise lost in its 1950s treatment of the format. Which is ironic because it’s supposed to be about this new generation of hipsters who are changing the work game.
I mean, shit, The Intern covered millennials 100 times better than this, giving each of its characters multiple traits (Adam Devine’s character wasn’t just the clueless millennial who spent all day on Facebook, but also a good friend to Robert DeNiro who helped him feel at home at the company). When you’re getting beat out by Nancy Meyers for character depth, you may want to reevaluate your teleplay.
I don’t get it guys. Why isn’t this format extinct? Everything about it is played out. And outside of the premise itself, there isn’t a single thing that’s new here. Wake me up when this format disappears.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I’ll qualify this by saying I’m not an expert on sitcoms, but I’ve always found that no matter WHAT you’re writing, it works best when you come up with a story first, then squeeze your setup in around that. Scripts are much less successful when you focus on setting up your world first, then try to squeeze in a story around that. The Great Indoors does the latter, leaving everything feeling forced, exposition-heavy, and worst of all, not very entertaining.
