Everybody's watching Nobody's Watching

I read this bit in the New York Times about a sitcom pilot called Nobody's Watching, which like many pilots went nowhere ... until it hit the internet.

A comedy called — with intended irony, but not in the way that it has worked out — "Nobody's Watching" has been available on YouTube for about two weeks. As of yesterday it had been downloaded more than 300,000 times by a growing legion of fans.

Most remarkable of all, the talk that the show has generated has already caught the ears of executives at several networks, some of whom are wondering if maybe this is a virus they might enjoy getting infected with.

"Nobody's Watching" seems to be another example of a story that the Internet world loves: the power of the amateur over the professionals. It is also the story of "viral video," which is what YouTube is all about. People post a snippet of self-made video, and word spreads about how funny, shocking, stupid or embarrassing it is.

But the big story behind "Nobody's Watching" is that a sitcom left for dead 18 months ago may actually spring back to life — on actual television — because its creators were too passionate about it to let it die, and because it really might be funnier than most everything else that is passing for comedy on television these days.

It's self-referential, witty and looks and sounds like Scrubs. (Makes sense, since it comes from Bill Lawrence, who created Scrubs.) Here's a sample: