Cavemen (TV series)

Synopsis

In the series, cavemen were never really fully supplanted by modern humans, but integrated into Homo sapiens civilization as a separate species sub-group. Cavemen are a small but widespread minority group that have been present in every global civilization since the dawn of recorded history (a montage scene in the opening credits shows Cavemen in Egyptian hieroglyphs, when George Washington crossed the Delaware River, standing with Abraham Lincoln, participating in the space program, etc.). Effectively, Cavemen form another ethnic minority in the modern world, which faces several prejudices from Homo sapiens (sometimes referring to humans by the derogatory term "Smoothies" in reference to their relative lack of hair, or "Sapes" in reference to their species). Although these cavemen self-identify as Cro-Magnon, their facial appearance and physical anatomy is reminiscent of the Neanderthal. (In reality, Cro-Magnon were Homo Sapiens.) The writer and producers clearly intended to portray the protagonists as (or like) Homo neanderthalensis, which is anatomically different from modern humans, but sufficiently closely related that they are not always classed as a separate species.

Cavemen have prominent brow ridges and more body hair than Homo sapiens, but beyond superficial differences in appearance they actually are not that much different from modern humans in terms of behavior or physical abilities. Male Cavemen are very hairy, have thick long beards and wear their head-hair shoulder-length. A Cavewoman that appeared on the show also had a prominent brow ridge and comparatively more body hair than a modern human female. Some Cavemen attempt to pass as Homo sapiens by shaving their body hair - other Cavemen call them "shavers". The central humor of the show is that Caveman characters are not brutish primitives, but fully integrated into white-collar jobs; the central Cavemen characters are effete modern city-dwellers. They must also endure racial epithets such as "Magger", a pun based on "Cro-Magnon".

The series focuses on three Cavemen who are roommates that share a condo: Joel, his brother Andy, and their cynical and self-absorbed roommate Nick.

According to producer Joe Lawson, the show was originally going to be set in Newport News, Virginia, due to its proximity to the water. The setting then changed to Atlanta, Georgia and finally San Diego, California.

Characters

Joel – The responsible straight-man of the group, a successful assistant-manager at a fashionable Norwegian furniture store (a parody of IKEA). In the pilot episode, Joel starts dating a Homo sapiens woman named Kate, and through subsequent episodes Joel tries to handle the hangups that come with inter-species dating.

Andy – Joel's weak-willed and childish, though well-meaning, brother. Andy is a trained accountant but is typically between jobs during the time period of the series, and he is perpetually morose about being dumped by his ex-girlfriend and hoping she will take him back. Andy is very timid, but ironically he is prone to outbursts of road rage when he is driving.

Nick – Joel and Andy's roommate, is metrosexual, cynical, self-absorbed, narcissistic, as well as pathologically lazy. Nick has no real job, though he claims to be "working on my dissertation", and tends to just mooch money off Joel. Nick's dissertation On Beyond Dualism: The Evolution of Symbology in a post-Primitive Society argues that modern popular culture is all just a ripoff of things that Cavemen have already done, and appears to have no real merit. Nick doesn't actually spend much time writing his dissertation, and "tends to just sit around watching TV and editing wikipedia". Nick has very effete and cultured tastes, believing himself to be intellectually superior to most people he meets, and overlooks the fact that he is simply lazy and does not believe in doing real work. Typically, Nick will blame his own failures (which are due to his innate laziness) on Caveman-based prejudice; case in point, when he filed an unlawful-termination lawsuit against Joel's furniture store when they fired him after he worked there a few days, claiming that they were prejudiced against him as a Caveman, but the store then revealed security camera footage which shows that Nick sat around listening to music all day and not working.

Kate – Joel's Homo sapiens girlfriend whom he starts dating in the first episode. Joel is initially worried that she is embarrassed to tell her friends that she is dating a Caveman, and then is left with the fear that she might like him only because she has a fetish for Cavemen. Nonetheless, Kate and Joel seem to have developed a stable relationship.

Leslie – Kate's eccentric mother is not on good terms with her husband, and each of them is actually cheating on the other without Kate's knowledge (Kate's father with the local weather-report girl, Kate's mother with a pool boy). Kate's mother is also the landlord of the condo complex that Joel, Andy, and Nick live in. A running gag is that in a parody of stereotypes of racism, Kate's mother cannot tell the difference between individual Cavemen. She does not try intentionally to be racist and is embarrassed that she appears to "think all Cavemen look the same", but nonetheless she does.

Maurice – another Caveman-about-town who is a friend of Joel, Andy, and Nick and frequently plays squash with them, as well as cruising around in his sports car trying to pick up women. Maurice is played by actor Jeff Daniel Phillips who was one of the cavemen in the original GEICO Caveman commercials that inspired the series.

Thorne – Kate's feisty roommate and best friend. She appeared to be developing a relationship with Joel's brother Andy.

Cast

Main Cast

Bill English – Joel Claybrook

Nick Kroll – Nick Hedge

Sam Huntington – Andy Claybrook

Kaitlin Doubleday – Kate McKinney

Jeff Daniel Phillips – Maurice

Stephanie Lemelin – Thorne

Julie White – Leslie McKinney, Kate's mother

Recurring Cast

John Heard – Tripp McKinney, Kate's father

Evan Shafran – Nathan

J. P. Manoux – Glen

Kim Director – Heather

Stephanie Courtney – Diane (ironically, Courtney is the spokeswoman for Progressive Corporation, a competitor to GEICO)

Conception

In March 2007, ABC gave a pilot order to a script written by Joe Lawson which was inspired by the GEICO Cavemen advertisements. Lawson would be executive producer alongside Guymon Casady, Daniel Rappaport, Josh Gordon & Will Speck. Gordon and Speck directed the pilot. Later in the same month, Bill Martin and Mike Schiff joined the staff as executive producers. ABC gave the series an early pick-up and a 13-episode order on May 11, 2007.

Casting

When the pilot was approved by the network in March, it was unclear if the original actors, Jeff Daniel Phillips and Ben Weber, who played the cavemen in the advertisements, were going to be part of the series. This was not to be when it was later reported that Nick Kroll, Kaitlin Doubleday, and Bill English had all landed roles in the series in the same month. Dash Mihok and Stephanie Lemelin were respectively cast in April as Jamie, Joel's younger brother, and Thorne, a party girl. John Heard rounded out the regular cast when he was chosen to play Trip in the same month. Mihok was replaced by Sam Huntington and the character of Jamie was renamed Andy in July. Tony Award winner, Julie White, was also promoted to a regular cast member as Kate's mother in the same month.

In July 2007 it was announced that Jeff Daniel Phillips had been cast for the series. He subsequently appeared in the first broadcast episode playing Maurice, a friend of the three main characters.

Pilot episode controversy

The initial limited screening of the pilot episode was met with a less than favorable reception. The pilot was accused of being racist because some critics thought the Cavemen were being used as a metaphor for blacks and other minorities. The series subsequently underwent a major creative "retooling", which included changing the show's venue from Atlanta, Georgia to San Diego, California. The pilot episode has remained unaired on ABC.

Reception

In terms of reception from the media the show was "critically savaged". The Chicago Tribune listed it as one of the 25 worst TV shows ever, and Adam Buckman of the New York Post declared the show "extinct on arrival." Ginia Bellafante of the New York Times wrote "I laughed. But I laughed through my pain. 'Cavemen,' set in some version of San Diego where people speak with Southern accents, doesn’t have moments as much as microseconds suspended from any attempt at narrative."

Other critics were more forgiving: H.T. Strong ("Hercules The Strong"), a regular columnist at Ain't It Cool News declared that the show's third episode "made me laugh aloud a number of times!" Pulitzer Prize-winning columinst Dorothy Rabinowitz also said that the show "has its charms... The chief source of that charm is the unmistakable hint of wit in the writing. Only a hint – but it's steady, which is enough to seduce."

In 2010, TV Guide Network listed the show at #22 on their list of 25 Biggest TV Blunders, arguing that basing a TV show on a commercial was a bad idea from the beginning.

Broadcast

Produced by ABC Studios and Management 360, the series originally aired alongside Carpoolers on Tuesday nights at 8:00 pm Eastern/7:00 pm Central. The series was placed on hiatus during the Writers Guild of America strike, and canceled before the strike ended. A total of 13 episodes were produced. The final seven episodes never aired in US markets but did however air in Australia.

Post-cancellation

After the show's cancellation, a Geico commercial was aired during Super Bowl XLII in which two cavemen watched television, switched it off, and had an exchange about Cavemen:

(blows a raspberry) "Huh. A TV show. About us." (disbelievingly)"What was the deal with that makeup?""Exactly! Why not just use real cavemen?""Well, I thought their diction was good. You could hear everything they were saying. At least they didn't say 'It's so easy a...'""Yeah. Yeah. At least there's that."

All 13 episodes were originally supposed to be released on DVD in 2008, however, plans were put on hold.

Weekly ratings

In the following summary, rating is the percentage of all households with televisions that tuned to the show, and "share" is the percentage of all televisions in use at that time that are tuned in.

Unless otherwise cited, the overnight rating and share information comes from Zap2It The following week, the Nielsen numbers from TVWeek.com. Additional ratings information, including the 18–49 rating, comes from BroadcastingCable and finally weekly overall ratings come from ABC Medianet

Seasonal ratings

Seasonal ratings based on average total viewers per episode of Cavemen on ABC:

+ Information is current as of January 7, 2008.

The show was pulled off the ABC Network following the airing of the 6th Episode "Rock Vote" due to the sliding ratings.

Worldwide premieres

2007: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Republic of Ireland

2008: France, Germany, Sweden, Mexico, Italy, Greece, India, Japan, Thailand and Dominican Republic

Overseas distribution

Aired on Channel Seven in Australia in 2008.

Aired on Comedy Central in the Netherlands in 2008.