If you’re involved in a creative pursuit in New York, your mom or your grandpa is always telling you to just walk right into Mr. NBC’s office and tell him about your great idea for a TV show. “You’re so funny, they’ll have to listen to you,” your mom says. “Jesus ma, that’s not how it works,” you reply. Except NBC is desperate now and has put out a call for comedy pitches from any damn idiot on the internet. Guess you mom was right again, so maybe you should also go out with that nice girl whose parents she met at shul last week.
Yes, you can now pitch your comedy idea to NBC through what they’re calling their “Comedy Playground.” It sounds like, but doesn’t appear to be, some kind of dumb gimmicky contest. Instead, it’s just a chance for you, the frustrated and beaten-down comedy writer of Brooklyn, to pitch something that will end up in front of NBC executives. Why, just look at this chart they made explaining the process:
With awesome charts like that, it’s no wonder NBC is totally not out of ideas and admitting it in the most public way possible! Anyway, you can start uploading your pitches to the Comedy Playground website on May 1, and if the NBC executives who gave Whitney the green light like your pitch, it will be judged by a team of advisors made up of the likes of Craig Robinson, Mindy Kaling Aziz Ansari, Amy Poehler, Adams Scott and McKay and many more famous people. Hey, if you’ve been dicking about with some web series lately, and a lot of you in Brooklyn seem to be doing that lately, this is as good a chance as any to make the leap to TV.
Meanwhile at CBS, they’re just laughing and lighting cigars with $1000 bills.