TV Execs Now Mining Twitter for Ideas

Many classic sitcoms — Cosby, Roseanne, Seinfeld — were built around a comedian’s standup routine. Today, though, Twitter is the new Chuckle Hut, thanks to CBS’s pick-up of the Twitter account S— My Dad Says (new TV-safe title TBD).

Adapting SMDS as a sitcom makes sense because what creator Justin Halpern does is use each Twitter update as a 140-character character portrait of his father, a man almost Archie Bunker-ish in his crassness — and exactly the sort of modern curmudgeon you can imagine building a sitcom around. The folks developing Texts From Last Night for Fox, meanwhile, have a much tougher gig on their hands, as that site is just a compilation of drunken mistakes. (Funny drunken mistakes, but whatever.)

It’s easy to look at something popular on the Internet and say “Hey, we should exploit that for TV.” But I’ll make my wager now that of these two ideas, it’s SMDS that will actually make it to broadcast — because no amount of Internet buzz can replace a good character and/or story.