Automatic pilot

The biggest middle finger Chicago theater has seen so far this year is currently extended from the stage of the Neo-Futurarium. (Although it’s directed in part at the comedy world.)

During the frantic opening moments of Picked Up, a rotating series of fake television pilots, the show’s creators—Dean Evans, Jay Torrence and Ryan Walters—express the self-doubting writer’s malaise that inspired the show. In one particularly fearless rant, a red-faced Torrence opens his playwriting fly and takes a piss on a golden calf (sort of lovingly, sort of not):

“And then you just feel desperate all the time, hating people like Charna Halpern—who keeps telling everyone she’s got Tina Fey in her Rolodex—and an endless herd of oily frat boys who’d give their left nut to be the next bloated dead Farley. And she’d take it too, the nut. Make a dog toy out of it and bring it to every Level 1 beginner improv class and let her mutt run across the stage where every minimum wage working improv student coughed up two hundred a head to learn that you actually need to be born with it.  The talent. I bet she drives a Camaro!”

Then, to spread the love a little, Walters imagines that the show receives a holy benediction from above: “Del Close’s ghost cock comes down from heaven and taps us on the forehead with his blessing.” (The introduction, which also includes some kickass acrobatics, remains each week as the main scripts change.)

Most of what’s gone on so far at Picked Up has been this lip-smackingly irreverent. The original pilots—three were written individually by the creators, and three more were penned by Ian Belknap, Sean Benjamin, Laura McKenzie and Lauren Sharpe—all skewer conventions of white-bread television writing, while still hugging the daylights out of them.

The first two pilots on display—Torrence’s Unitards, about a group of special-needs students who form a wrestling team, and McKenzie and Belknap’s The Colony, about six high school kids living in a space station—both used the most insultingly formulaic templates possible to create a product that was insulting in entirely different (delicious) way. The humor in Unitards, designed for discomfort, was laden with poop jokes, molestation references and jokes at the expense of the mentally challenged. Torrence’s dream cast barreled through the material with zeal and only the slightest are-we-really-getting-away-with-this smirks.

McKenzie and Belknap’s space-set teen sitcom didn’t veer nearly as close to the scatological. But between the HAL-like shuttle computer that endlessly tries to convert the colony members to Evangelical Christianity; the brainy Asian character who only gets to talk about math paired with the resident raving drama queen (Kurt Chiang and Jennifer Santanello, pictured above, were the highlights of my weekend in these roles); and the apocalyptic subplot in which the discovery of a stowed-away, oxygen-sucking cheerleader may lead to cannibalism, it’s safe to say the two writers still got their licks in.

Picked Up is meant to illuminate the plight of the writer fighting to get his work seen. Each week the contributing writer is strapped to a chair and forced to watch the entire final product in Clockwork Orange-like restraints. Afterward, once the audience has voted on whether or not the “series” should get picked up, the writer is given 30 seconds to plead desperately with disapproving audience members to change their votes.

While neither show was perfect, the point of the experiment (or at least part of it) seems to be to make a brand-new product every week that requires a ton of effort but is also instantly disposable. I suppose if you view theater as procreation-only rather than recreational, that’s pretty offensive, too.

For your enticement, the Neos took the time to make trailers for all six pilots. Check 'em out.