new show review: Cavemen
October 3rd, 2007 by screenwriterguy
Well, that was weird. I’ve been waiting for weeks to bash the premiere of Cavemen. I wanted to jump all over network television for selling out, or for scraping the bottom of the idea barrel. But, oddly, the show doesn’t suck. Huh.
Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a winner. It’s about cavemen. At the same time, it pulls off a dryness in tone that’s actually quite worthy. The writing is smart, the performances are fantastic, and there’s a hipster charm to the show I hadn’t expected. The creative team came off of Blades of Glory, and indeed the humor would most closely match Will Ferril-style comedy.
Other shows premiering this fall feature smart premises and weak execution. In contrast, Cavemen features sophisticated execution, and THE WORST CONCEPT IN THE WORLD. You could send a thousand creative teams away and ask them to work this concept, and no one would do a better job than the pilot that aired on ABC this week. But at the end of the day, it’s a show about cavemen in modern society. How good could that ever be?
The concept is that Cro Magnon man never went extinct, as popular “myth” would lead us to believe, but that they’ve been living with us all long. Essentially, the show creates its own ethnic group. Cavemen, in this world, are exactly like other people, except for their hair and cranial structure. The main conflict in the pilot is about one of the cavemen dating a homo sapien, despite the fact that his friends and perhaps hers don’t really support interspecies dating.
Try to think back to the FIRST time you saw the FIRST Geico commercial with the caveman protesting that signing up for insurance was so simple, “even a caveman can do it.” Overall, the show is funny in the way that commercial was.
Interestingly, the producers of this show did not release the pilot for critics. When I saw that news, I thought it was similar to when a movie isn’t sent out for review before its opening weekend, meaning that the producers know that reviews can only hurt their opening. It turns out that instead, the show was being significantly reworked. The official word was that the changes had to do with moving the setting from Atlanta to San Diego. However, I got a copy of the other version. I am certain the reworking had to do with responding to the criticism that the cavemen were too analogous to African Americans. The original includes scenes of cavemen having a hard time getting into a restricted country club, and with the protagonist worrying that his fiance’s father does not approve of him. Cavemen complain about the stereotypes against them, including a scene in which a caveman robber makes the local news. Only the bad ones get publicity, our heroes complain. In the rework, the conflict stems from the protagonist worried that his girlfriend is trying to hide her relationship with a caveman. Parents were gone, and some of the prejudice was put onto the cavemen. Moving from Atlanta was pretty clearly not about inability to recreate the feel of the city while shooting in L.A., as the official story goes, but about eliminating the Confederacy feeling that dominated the first version. While both versions are clear-cut analogies for racism, the reshoot does it with respect, where the first version was clunky and gross.
Best aspect: “Keep your penis in your genus.” Not scientifically accurate, but it still made me chuckle.
Worst aspect: They’re CAVEMEN.
Verdict: My morbid curiosity has not entirely been quelled. I’m not making room on the watchlist, but it didn’t suck enough to make me avoid it.
Odds of success: Well, I mean, who would have thought it would get made at all? So how do you predict what will happen from here.
Similar Posts:
Oct 4th 2007 at 10:41 am
Where a majority of sitcoms have exactly the same premise — goofy, immature husband and his smarter wife have problems raising the kids — I don’t know why you are so against a show that stems from a pretty clever series of commercials…
Glad to see that it threw you for a loop.
And thanks for the interesting history, I hadn’t read about that.
Oct 4th 2007 at 2:17 pm
I’m all for premises that push past yet-another-family-sitcom. And I admit that some of my issue with the show comes from its origins as a commercial. After all, if they’re that desperate for ideas, I have stuff they can use!
But ultimately, the premise just doesn’t quite feel right as a sitcom. Funny concept for a thirty-second ad, yes. But this does not 22 episodes a year make. There was almost zero reason for these guys to be cavemen. It was a source of some conflict, but it didn’t create humor. If you’re going to have a non-sequitor randomness in your story, it should at least be funny.