A modern day fairytale

Once upon a time (2005), the guy who created Scrubs made a new sitcom pilot for Warner Brothers called Nobody's Watching - an in-jokey show about two sitcom fans who try to write their own while being followed by reality TV cameras. It has echoes of the Truman Show, Seinfeld and Friends, amongst other things, I'd say.

It never got any further than the pilot stage but instead was posted onto You Tube where it gained a following and apparently 300,000 views. And happy ending! Following its online success, the show is going to be picked up for a series.

It's not the first time a website has spawned a show, rather than the other way around - a recent example is The Law of the Playground (‘not as funny as it thinks it is’ – Radio Times).

But instead of being picked up for television, NBC - who previously objected to You Tube hosting copyrighted material on their site - have comissioned a series of webisodes to be shown only on the web.

It's an interesting turn of events; it's just that I think the pilot got dropped for a reason.