Steve Carell writing cop comedy for TBS rather than star in our Dan In Real Life sequel

By Sean O'Neal  |  November 6, 2013 | 10:59pm
Aux Features TV

Furthering TV’s growing belief that law and order is something to be laughed at, every ha-ha-homicide another grisly case… of the giggles, TBS has ordered a new half-hour police procedural spoof misleadingly titled Tribeca. Misleading, as Tribeca refers not to the New York neighborhood (near the streets patrolled by Brooklyn Nine-Nine), but rather its protagonist, Angie Tribeca, a detective in the Los Angeles police department’s Really Heinous Crimes Unit—which is funny, because “heinous crimes” sounds like “anus crimes,” and also because their victims don’t even matter, because they’re just fake people on a sitcom. The single-camera comedy will track Angie and her fellow “eccentric but brilliant” investigators —also described as “more than counter-intuitive; they are non-intuitive”—as they somehow, sometimes solve crimes and “reveal way too much personal information.”

Fittingly, the show hails from a guy who has experience with single-camera comedies set in workplaces whose employees spend more time over-sharing than being efficient: Steve Carell, who will make his return to TV behind the camera this time, directing the pilot of the show he will co-write and co-executive produce with his wife, Nancy Carell (née Walls). Of course, in what is the most heinous, non-hilarious crime in this whole thing, Carell being busy with another weekly TV series means he'll once more have little time to spare for Dan In Real Life 2: Back 2 The Life, even though with each passing chapter that we write, it only becomes more unavoidably irritating.

EXT. SUBURBAN BACKYARD

Dan stands with a young girl and boy on a makeshift miniature golf course, created in the sprawling backyard of a ridiculously expensive home someone who has the idle time to create makeshift miniature golf courses would never be able to afford. He’s smiling, yet his face also betrays an odd confusion, as though he’s not quite sure how he got here. He seems to remember a sensation of being in danger, though it’s faraway and fuzzy now…

A guy who looks like Ryan Gosling walks up.

DAN
What are you doing here?

RYAN GOSLING GUY
What are you doing here?

DAN
I’m having trouble understanding what’s going on right now.

GUY WHO DEFINITELY LOOKS A LOT LIKE RYAN GOSLING
Cal, what are you doing with a daughter that’s… grown-up?

DAN
Why are you calling me “Cal”?

Dan realizes that the guy who looks like Ryan Gosling is accompanied by a nearby girl. Though her body is normal, her head is that of a giant, reptilian alien. She slowly opens and closes a slit over the yellow cataract of her eye, and Dan realizes she is winking at him. That sensation of recent danger begins to grow slightly stronger.

DAN

Let me get this straight. You guys are together. You’re a couple? And I am a wounded, middle-aged man whose vulnerability and general ineffectualness prevent me from getting the love I deserve, until I slowly come out of my shell and take a chance, leading me at last to true happiness?

GUY WHO IS PROBABLY RYAN GOSLING
Yeah.

The reptilian cracks open its jaw, exposing row upon row of glistening fangs. It gargles in what sounds like agreement, or possibly ravenous hunger.

DAN

No, no, no, no way. Break up right now, and stop dripping what appears to be hydrochloric acid from your pores all over my lawn.

YEP, THAT’S RYAN GOSLING
Cal, that’s not gonna happen. Let’s talk about this.

Suddenly, another young woman dressed in quirky, sloppy “bohemian” clothes charges across the yard at Dan. She has the skeletal frame of Keira Knightley, and the reptilian, alien head of Keira Knightley.

QUIRKY KEIRA KNIGHTLEY ALIEN

Dodge, the end of the world is approaching, and we have to get my vintage sweaters and vinyl records home to my family!

Before he can react, the Knightley Alien has tackled Dan, knocking him to the ground. He blacks out.

INT. SEWAGE TUNNEL
Dan awakes in a pool of amniotic fluid, the undulating waves of which press him against the sewer’s sluice gate. He groggily touches the back of his head where its bars nailed him, slowly coming to realize that he’s been unconscious. He looks around to see that the amniotic pool is actually filled with the thousands of glowing, writhing reptilian eggs that Marie launched from her vagina, sending him careening into this tunnel. And those eggs are beginning to hatch.

DAN
Oh, thank God.

 
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