The World Is Wrong, Vol. 1: Conan O'Brien and Robert Smigel's "Lookwell"

Two comedy legends fail to read the room

A freeze from the 1991 NBC sitcom “Lookwell”.

I love a good failure. And I know why: Seeing other people fail tell me that I’m not the only one whose best efforts often turn into an exploding ball of shit. Failure is the norm in creative fields — there are times when it feels like my daily schedule is basically this:

My favorite kind of failure is failure by someone who has made great stuff — that proves that it can happen to anybody! In fact, it’s possible to look at the rags-to-riches arc of many successful people and convince yourself that failure is just the first step in a process that ends with future generations carving your face into the moon. I highly recommend this mental trick; it allows you to respond to every smackdown from the universe by saying: “Excellent — it’s all going according to plan.”

And that’s why I’ve decided to write this series about forgotten gems from successful people that simply didn’t catch on. I’ve got the first three in the series planned out:

1. The 1991 Conan O’Brien/Robert Smigel TV pilot Lookwell

2. The 1994 Coen Brothers non-hit The Hudsucker Proxy

3. Spectre, the Radiohead James Bond theme that never was

It’s not just that these works from highly acclaimed artists didn’t become hits — it’s also that, IMHO (and the opinion of many others), they’re extremely good. These aren’t Magical Mystery Tour or Empire of the Sun situations, in which great artists made things that didn’t click and perhaps deserved to not click. These are works that certainly could have and arguably should have clicked, but for some reason, they just didn’t. That can probably teach us something about…I dunno, something.

So, let’s dive in: In 1990, two up-and-coming SNL writers named Conan O’Brien and Robert Smigel had an idea for a TV pilot starring Adam West, a.k.a. TV’s Batman. O’Brien and Smigel pitched the idea to NBC and got a green light, thus beginning a process that would result in NBC spending $2 million on the brainchild of two 20-something comedy nerds, air the pilot once, see it get 92nd place out of 92 shows that night, and never speak of it again. Only when O’Brien and Smigel went on to huge success did the world find the show and realize that it’s fucking hilarious.

And you can watch the whole damn thing for free on YouTube — here it is:

You can get the play-by-play of how Lookwell was born, lived a beautiful 23-minute life, and then was tossed into an unmarked grave from this interview that O’Brien and Smigel did after West passed away in 2017. The interview reveals that the Occam’s Razor explanation for what happened here — “the network didn’t get it” — is largely not correct. Here’s what Smigel and O’Brien said about NBC entertainment president Brandon Tartikoff, who greenlit the show:

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Brandon Tartikoff was a big fan of the show, but there had to have been some executives at NBC that didn’t get all this Saharan-dry humor. Do you remember your favorite note or just something that made you laugh about that process?

SMIGEL: We didn’t even get notes because we got to work directly with Tartikoff. He gave us little notes here and there. In fact, we tried to pull them out of him because we actually had a lot of respect for him. When we met him, I remember coming away from the meeting and we’re both saying, “Oh, so that’s a guy who really deserves to run a network! He knows so much.”

O’BRIEN: He was a fan of television and he had a very sophisticated knowledge of it. When we sat down with him, what I appreciated was that he was like, “Look, this is funny, but what you’re trying to do is something that a million people have tried and it has never worked.” And we said, “What’s that?” And he said, “Bring Get Smart back into prime time.” And I remember thinking, “He’s right.”

Tartikoff famously kept Cheers and Seinfeld on the air despite low ratings in their early years, so he had as much credibility as it was possible to have in terms of spotting things that will eventually work. The fact that he was skeptical about Lookwell’s prospects speaks volumes, and — as much as I hate to say it — I think he was probably right: Lookwell probably wouldn’t have been a hit even if NBC hadn’t pulled support after the pilot was shot. Lookwell was simply ahead of its time. But it’s also true that few absurdist sitcoms have been hits even as the TV landscape has changed in ways that should make them more possible. Why is that? I think the answer highlights a pretty glaring market failure.

Sitcoms in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s were huge operations. Cable had only barely begun to eat into network TV’s dominance, and shows typically did 24-episode seasons. From a modern vantagepoint, that’s insane; I wrote on a 13-episode sitcom and can’t imagine doubling that output. But, that’s how they did it back then: 24-episode seasons, 20-plus person writers rooms, tens of millions of people watching the top shows, and banks and hospitals close if you have a M*A*S*H-type finale.

The format surely dictated the content. If you’re going to be with characters for 30 minutes at a time — minus eight minutes of ads for DDT and thalidomide — for 24 episodes a year, you have to like those characters. And, sure enough: personality-driven sitcoms were the norm, from I Love Lucy to The Dick van Dyke Show to — height of irony — The Cosby Show. I’ve watched a few Cheers episodes recently, and the ambient chumminess is unmissable: That show is seven friends hanging out in a fun bar where they fucking tell you “everybody knows your name!” I would love to hang out in Cheers — they should sell fantasy camp packages where you can hang out in a bar where you’re surrounded by zinger-slinging waitresses and drinks that never seem to cost money. Basically every sitcom back then was full of likable people hanging out in places where you’d want to spend time.

When audiences back then encountered a sitcom that didn’t offer that, their response was typically: “What the fuck is this”? The foundation of Lookwell is the jokes, which is also true of beloved-but-not-commercially-successful sitcoms like Police Squad, The Critic, and — a bit later — Arrested Development. Lookwell doesn’t even have a laugh track — laugh track-free, single-camera sitcoms wouldn’t really gain acceptance until the 2000s. On the one hand, it’s remarkable that Lookwell is still funny even though it aired in 1991, but on the other hand, this is really a 2011 sitcom that accidentally aired 20 years too early.

The conditions that necessitated sitcoms with broad appeal and likable characters have changed. The media landscape has splintered; these days, you can make a TV show just for nerds as long as you get all the nerds. Sitcom seasons are often 8-12 episodes, so it should be more possible to get by on jokes instead of chummy vibes. Also, a show can sit on a streamer and hope to generate buzz instead of occupying a valuable time slot where, say, Touched By An Angel could have aired. The factors that seem to have doomed Lookwell have largely disappeared.

So…where are the smart, absurdist sitcoms? It seems like we should be swimming in the stylistic descendents of Lookwell, Arrested Development, and 30 Rock, but we’re not. Shows like Hacks and The Bear are smart and not-broad, but they’re definitely not absurdist (are they even comedies?). Three current shows kind of fit the bill of what I’m describing: Rick & Morty, I Think You Should Leave, and Cunk on Earth. But Rick & Morty is 12 years old, and I Think You Should Leave and Cunk on Earth aren’t sitcoms. It seems that comedy is experiencing its version of the Fermi paradox — where are the laughs?

I don’t quite know the answer to that question. I think it has something to do with the influx of theatre kids that has taken over comedy in the last decade or so — I’m not sure that the type of talent that can create Lookwell or Rick & Morty can break through. And I think that streamers are still figuring out the business; they still haven’t found out a way to introduce new shows to replace the old model of “it’s one of only three shows on right now so watch it and shut up.” Or, maybe the answer is that TV should have more high quality comedies and just…doesn’t. Sometimes, the explanation for something is “that’s just how it went”.

It’s a shame that we can’t teleport 1991 O’Brien, Smigel, and West to the present day and have them make Lookwell. The show’s time has finally arrived, a mere eight years after the lead actor died. At the end of the EW interview, Smigel mentioned that there’s been interest in reviving Lookwell in some form, possibly with Nicholas Cage in the main role, but Smigel and O’Brien aren’t interested without West. There’s no going back — Lookwell’s window of opportunity has closed. Though the window for Lookwell-type shows should be wide open.

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