Cavemen (TV series)

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Cavemen
Format	Comedy Drama
Created by	Joe Lawson
Starring	Bill English Nick Kroll Sam Huntington Kaitlin Doubleday Jeff Daniel Phillips
Country of origin	United States
No. of seasons	1
No. of episodes	13 (7 unaired) (List of episodes)
Production
Camera setup	Single-camera setup
Running time	Approx. 22 min.
Broadcast
Original channel	ABC
Original run	October 2, 2007 – November 13, 2007
External links
IMDb profile
TV.com summary

Cavemen is an American television show which ran on ABC from October 2, 2007 to November 13, 2007. The show was created by Joe Lawson and set in San Diego, California. Inspired by the GEICO Cavemen advertisements made for the American vehicle insurance company GEICO that were written by Lawson, the show is described by the network as a "unique buddy comedy that offers a clever twist on stereotypes and turns race relations on its head".

Produced by ABC Studios and Management 360, the series originally aired alongside Carpoolers on Tuesday nights at 8:00PM Eastern/7:00PM Central.^[1] The series was placed on hiatus during the Writers Guild of America strike,^[2] and quietly cancelled before the strike ended.^[3]

Contents 1 Synopsis 2 Characters 3 Cast 4 Production history 4.1 Conception 4.2 Casting 4.3 Pilot episode controversy 4.4 Reception 4.5 Full circle 5 Episodes and U.S. ratings 5.1 Weekly 5.1.1 List of Cavemen episodes 5.2 Seasonal Ratings 6 Worldwide Premieres 6.1 Overseas distribution 7 References 8 External links

[edit] Synopsis

In the series, Cavemen were never 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 (actually, a different species) 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. Cro-Magnon is actually not a different species of human ancestors. It refers to a specific group of archaeological discoveries near the Cro-Magnon rock formation in France, which are actually representative of early anatomically modern humans. If these cavemen were Cro-Magnon, then they were simply European people. The writer and producers really meant that they were members of Homo Neanderthalensis, which is anatomically different from modern humans.

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" (John Tesh is said to be one).

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".^[4]

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.

[edit] Characters

• Joel - The responsible straight-man of the group, a successful assistant-manager at a fashionable Norwegian furniture store (a parody of Ikea). However, 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.
• Nick - Joel and Andy's roommate, is cynical, self-absorbed, and 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. The theme of Nick's rambling dissertation is essentially to prove 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 doesn't 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.
• 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'll take him back. Andy is very timid, but ironically he is prone to outbursts of road rage when he is driving.
• 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 doesn't 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 little best friend. She appeared to be developing a relationship with Joel's brother Andy.

[edit] Cast

Main Cast

• Bill English - Joel
• Nick Kroll - Nick
• Sam Huntington - Andy^[5]
• Kaitlin Doubleday - Kate McKinney
• Jeff Daniel Phillips - Maurice
• Stephanie Lemelin - Thorne
• Julie White - Leslie McKinney, Kate's mother^[6]

Recurring

• John Heard - Tripp McKinney, Kate's father
• Evan Shafran - Nathan
• J. P. Manoux - Glen
• Kim Director - Heather
• Tim Allen - Himself (Cameo, 6 Episodes)

[edit] Production history

[edit] 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, Josh Gordon, Daniel Rappaport and Will Speck. Gordon and Speck directed the pilot.^[7] Later in the same month, Bill Martin and Mike Schiff joined the staff as executive producers.^[8] ABC gave the series an early pick-up and a thirteen-episode order on May 11, 2007.^[9]

[edit] 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.^[7] This wasn't 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.^[8] Dash Mihok and Stephanie Lemelin were respectively cast in April as Jamie, Joel's younger brother, and Thorne, a party girl.^[10] John Heard rounded up the regular cast when he was chosen to play Trip in the same month.^[11] Mihok was replaced by Sam Huntington and the character of Jamie was re-named Andy in July. Tony Award winner, Julie White, was also promoted to a regular cast member as Kate's mother in the same month.^[5][6]

In July 2007 it was announced that Jeff Daniel Phillips had been cast for the series.^[12] He subsequently appeared in the first broadcast episode playing Maurice, a friend of the three main characters.

[edit] 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 too edgy,^[13] because some critics thought the Cavemen were being used as a metaphor for blacks and other minorities.^[14] The series subsequently underwent a major creative "retooling", which included changing the show's venue from Atlanta, Georgia to San Diego, California.^[15][16] The pilot episode has remained unaired on ABC.

[edit] Reception

In terms of reception from the media the show was "critically savaged".^[17] The Chicago Tribune listed it as one of the 25 worst TV shows ever,^[18] and Adam Buckman of the New York Post declared the show "extinct on arrival."^[19] 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."^[20]

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!".^[21] 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." ^[22]

[edit] Full circle

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) "A TV show. About us." (disbelievingly)

"What was the deal with that makeup?"

"Exactly! I mean why not just use real cavemen?"

[edit] Episodes and U.S. ratings

[edit] Weekly

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^[23] The following week, the nielsen numbers from TVWeek.com.^[24] Additional ratings information, including the 18–49 rating, comes from BroadcastingCable^[25] and finally weekly overall ratings come from ABC Medianet ^[26]

[edit] List of Cavemen episodes

#	Title	Air Date	Rating	Share	18-49	Viewers	Rank (Timeslot)	Rank (Overall)
1	"Her Embarrassed of Caveman"	October 2, 2007	6.1	10	3.3/10	9.06[27]	#1	#34
2	"Nick Get Job"	October 9, 2007	4.5	8	2.5/8	6.96[28]	#3	#59
3	"The Cavewoman"	October 16, 2007	4.6	8	2.7/8	6.92[29]	#3	#64
4	"The Mascot"	October 23, 2007	4.5	7	2.2/6	6.55[30]	#4	#71
5	"The Shaver"	November 6, 2007	3.4	5	1.7/5	5.51 [31]	#4	#83
6	"Rock Vote"	November 13, 2007	3.3	5	1.6/5	4.61 [32]	#4	#84

[edit] Seasonal Ratings

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

Season	Timeslot (EDT)	Season Premiere	Season Finale	TV Season	Rank	Viewers (in millions)
1	Tuesday 8:00 P.M. (October 2, 2007 - November 13, 2007)	October 2, 2007	November 13, 2007	2007-2008	#78	6.6

+ Information is current as of January 7, 2008. ^[33]

The show was pulled off the ABC Network following the airing of the 6th Episode "Rock Vote" due to the sliding ratings. According to the IMDB, the show stated that the remaining 7 episodes of the show would begin airing on February 13, 2008, but on that date the show was neither aired nor mentioned.

[edit] Worldwide Premieres

• 2007: USA, Canada, U.K., Australia, New Zealand and Republic of Ireland
• 2008: France, Germany, Sweden, Mexico, Italy, Greece, India, Japan, Thailand and Dominican Republic

[edit] Overseas distribution

• Airs on Channel Seven in Australia in 2008.^[34]
• Currently airs on Comedy Central in the Netherlands.^[35]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Cavemen at the Internet Movie Database
• Cavemen at TV.com