In a story we picked up on during the waning hours of Friday and futilely hoped would disappear over the weekend, CBS has once again outsourced its script development to Twitter, picking up the popular feed Dear Girls Above Me as a potential new series to be executive produced by Ashton Kutcher’s Katalyst company. The feed run by Charlie McDowell—son of actors Malcolm McDowell and Mary Steenburgen, and stepson of Ted Danson—is structured as a series of “letters” composed to the two girls living directly above McDowell’s apartment, who apparently say humorously vapid bon mots, like, all the time.
This will be CBS’s third Twitter-based sitcom, following the recent acquisition of Shhh… Don’t Tell Steve, which chronicles the humorously vapid things said by a guy’s loveably sex-crazed man-child roommate, and of course, the continued actual existence of $#!* My Dad Says, which collects all the stuff a guy’s cantankerous father says. So essentially, all old sitcom tropes are suddenly new again, provided they’re filtered through the secondhand superiority of a Twitter feed. Look for the “Overheard Brash Single Mom” and “The Sometimes Dumb Things The Attractive Co-Ed Twentysomethings Living Next Door To Me Do On Their Way To Finding Love And Professional Success” feeds soon.