The TV world hasn't exactly had a great track record of turning social media phenomena into half-hour comedy shows ($#*! My Dad Says, anyone?) But don't tell that to ABC: the network just gave the green light to a social media-themed sitcom pilot by Emily Kapnek, creator of Suburgatory. Its title: Selfie.
The comedy is apparently "inspired by My Fair Lady", a musical which was itself based on George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion. According to Entertainment Weekly, the show "tells the story of a self-obsessed 20-something woman who is more concerned with Likes than being liked.
"After suffering a very public and humiliating breakup, she becomes the subject of a viral video and suddenly has more social media ‘followers’ than she ever imagined — but for all the wrong reasons. She enlists the help of a marketing expert at her company to help repair her tarnished image."
See also: The Social Psychology of the Selfie
Get it? She's self-obsessed and trying to rehabilitate her image — hence Selfie. We're not quite sure what that has to do with My Fair Lady, which was about a linguistics expert trying to get a cockney flower seller to pass as a member of the aristocracy by retraining her speech patterns, but we'll let that pass.
Kapnek, now in her third season as Suburgatory showrunner, has talked about her own love-hate relationship with social media in the past. "I was not on Twitter for the longest time," she told the Los Angeles Times. My biggest concern was creating a direct line of contact with the people who post on say, oh, I don’t know, the Deadline Hollywood message boards. But what I really didn’t anticipate was the fan part of communication would be so awesome."