CBS Decision to Option Twitter's "Sh*t My Dad Says" Has Air of Inevitability

Either the networks are running out of ideas or this whole Internet thing is chock full of ‘em. That’s all I can think of following the news that the Twitter account “Shit My Dad Says” has just gotten an option from BNET Media’s corporate overlord, CBS, to have a cleaner version turned into a sitcom. If you are not in the know, the account, run by a guy named Justin Halpern, consists solely of quotations from his crusty old Dad, who allegedly spouts such tweets of wisdom as, “The baby will talk when he talks, relax. It ain’t like he knows the cure for cancer and he just ain’t spitting it out.”

Whatever its significance, the deal marks the rather astounding rise of Halpern, who, since launching the account in August, and after a mere 72 tweets, has built it to over 700,000 followers. It has also been put on more than 13,000 Twitter lists (a new Twitter service which allows Twitter users to group accounts into lists by topic), even though the product has been out for only about a week and a half. Oh, and Halpern has already scored a book deal too, with Harper Collins.

But getting back to the central question — of whether TV has run out of ideas or whether the Internet has good ones — the answer is yes, and no, to both. (OK, so they were trick questions.) At this point, reading the “Dad” tweets do have the effect of making a character emerge — and the thought of a 29-year-old moving back into his parent’s house, as Halpern did, is, in and of itself, comedic material, though that’s been played out on TV before.  It also helps that Halpern already is a writer — at Maxim. However, in this deal one does sense a bit of TV’s age-old desperation to keep up with the new, and happening, especially since the medium almost unfailingly caters to young people. Somehow you know that even if the 73-year-old dad becomes the hero of the series, everything will be portrayed through the eyes of the son. The struggle to remain relevant was also behind NBC’s decision a few years back to pick up the YouTube sitcom “Nobody’s Watching“ — but it’s certainly worth nothing that it never actually aired.

I didn’t realize, until I read Mashable this morning, that this, in fact, is the second digital meme to be optioned by a TV network in the last few months. The first, based off a Web site called “Texts From Last Night” was picked up by Fox. “Shit My Dad Says” seems like the quality project of the two — unless you think the height of wit is stuff like “so i was eating a special k bar this morning for breakfast and started choking on it so i reached into my bag for water turns out it was liquor.” Sheesh.