Having enjoyed great success with The Big Bang Theory—its show about two very smart yet awkward and TV-version-of-unattractive men, who find their lives rocked by a beautiful girl who moves in next door—CBS is now eager to reverse that formula, rather than doing something else. Deadline reports that it’s just snapped up Gorgeous Morons, a show that turns sitcom convention on its ear by concerning “two stunningly handsome but dumb brothers, a model and a personal trainer, who find their lives rocked by their new roommate, a female literature PhD. who is merely very attractive”—i.e. she’s gorgeous by most reasonable standards, but likely wears glasses, and maybe sometimes a cardigan. “Ugh. You are, at best, very attractive,” her roommates’ handsome model friends will say when turning her down for dates, after which she probably offers a smart-mouthed reply, then secretly goes to cry on some books.
Gorgeous Morons comes from Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, the former Office writers who have enjoyed a successful year by landing not only Stephen Merchant’s Hello Ladies at HBO, but also Trophy Wife at ABC, and an adaptation of their own Bad Teacher at CBS. Like those last two, Gorgeous Morons relies on the timeless comedy of pretty, shallow people commingling in situations where pretty, shallow people generally do not. And thank God they do that sometimes, because otherwise what would sitcoms be about? An alien crash-landing in the backyard of a suburban family? No, because they already did that, and it was called ALF. Try again.