Prehistoric Pilot
Somehow, the story of the Geico Cavemen getting a sitcom deal on ABC flew around the blogosphere under my radar last week. So, when Heather clued me in while we were on vacation in Florida over the weekend, I absolutely didn’t believe her. No way, I protested; despite the nagging feeling that we live in a time where originality is at an all-time low on television, I still couldn’t believe that a major network would seriously discuss airing a half-hour sitcom based on the cavemen from the Geico commercials.
Yet here I sit eating lunch, watching the teaser for Cavemen, actually set to air this fall, in which the Cro-Magnon lead characters will “struggle with prejudice on a daily basis [and] strive to live the lives of normal thirty-somethings in 2007 Atlanta.”
I suppose that the mixed reactions around the web indicate that I’m wrong to imagine that a show like this should be universally panned before it even makes it to air. For example, as far as I can tell, one film blogger seems to be totally serious when she calls the premise “can’t-miss-funny“. Still, Ain’t It Cool News called the yet-to-be-leaked pilot episode “astoundingly awful”, and there are those who even find the concept quasi-racist.
I know I’ll be on the edge of my seat this fall, if only to see how the caveman prosthetics hold up in high definition.