Super Nerds

Super Nerds is a failed sitcom pilot from 2000, starring Patton Oswalt as a guy named Leslie who works in a comic shop. There's also a guy named Gayle who doesn't work there, but is there all day anyway, and the shop's owner: an insane immigrant from some vaguely soviet country who's obsessed with money and business. The other main character is Gwen (played by Sarah Silverman), Leslie's childhood friend who just moved back to town and inexplicably has a crush on him.

I'm not really familiar with Patton Oswalt's work, but he seems to be pretty popular with a certain kind of Funko Pop-collecting "nerd culture" types, and watching this, I can see why. It's like if The Big Bang Theory was made a decade earlier. Easy references to things everyone knows like Star Trek, Star Wars and Spider-man's origin being treated as jokes on their own, along with tired old cliches about overweight nerds at conventions in ill-fitting costumes and male nerds being unable to talk in the presence of a woman. There's even a part where a character gets angry to the point of yelling when someone suggests characters from the Marvel and DC universes meeting up.

Being a pilot, I can forgive some of the problems the show has, like the audience sounding as if its made up of about ten people, and the plot obviously being little more than a set up for future shenanigans, but the biggest crimes that Super Nerds commits are unforgivable for a sitcom: it's never funny and all the characters are boring. Another way in which it's similar to The Big Bang Theory! There's been plenty of failed pilots that I've watched and wished the show got made, but Super Nerds definitely isn't one of them.