Film Futurist

The fact that CBS greenlit Sh*t My Dad Says, a sitcom based on a Twitter based meme is notable for a few reasons. First, in terms of the Hollywood machine, I believe this is a first – taking a fictional character from the social media world and creating a series around it. Second, I think it’s worth noting that the character William Shatner now plays, which is based on Justin Halpern’s cranky, salty and inappropriate 74 year old dad had a solid audience BEFORE it moved to TV.

Below is a CBS promotional video for the series, launching this fall. My immediate feeling was that I enjoy the twitter feed more than what I can see of the show so far. The obvious reason is that so much of Halpern’s dad’s humor is totally R-rated, and it doesn’t translate to network TV.You can watch the video below and also read the original Twitter feed to see what you think.

I’ve long been fascinated by memes like I Can Haz Cheezburger and FAILblog, many of which have been extended to print and published in book form. The beauty of most Memes is that they are image-based and take a split second to appreciate – essentially a single joke that can be played in many ways to great comic effect. But with entirely text-based memes like we’ve seen on Twitter, including TextsFromLastNight (which I’ve also heard will soon become a TV show),  I wonder if there is something that makes some memes more narratively compelling than others.

With William Shatner in the role of the Dad from ShitMyDadSays, a nice dovetailing of Shatner’s own social media savvy and interest (he’s very active and often amusing on Twitter as @WilliamShatner) with the clippy, 140 character way in which the Dad character developed on Twitter makes for a more interesting experiment than most. It makes me wonder if the secret sauce is character + personality = sustainable series. We will soon find out if the 1.4 million fans of the @shitmydadsays meme will actually enjoy the extension into story and stick around to watch the show.