Super I.T. Friends

Created By: Mike Manor

INTRODUCTION

The Internet. It’s this toilsome place we inhabit every day, but what is it? What does it look like? Is it a saturated Wreck-It-Ralph theme park? Maybe a hellish, post-art, sandbox? Say it was just an abstraction of Earth. Twitter is now a neighborhood you live in, doing a google search is like going to the DMV. But you hardly think about that anymore. You’re late on rent. Despite being completely digitized, you’ve still got work in the morning. Your mattress is on the ground even though life on Earth ended ten years ago. You’re 28, hungover, going nowhere, stuck in the internet with the worst job of your life

What’s that job? Super I.T. Friends.

Super I.T. Friends is the “Geek Squad” of everyone’s permanent digital reality. They’re a service that promises to fix any universe problem. Imagine if real life had a customer service hotline and if you called, they’d send a band of broke twenty-somethings to give it a look. Could be some idiot stuck down a YouTube hole, could be a civilization-ending virus. All for below minimum wage! What a deal.

At its heart, Super I.T. Friends is a sci-fi office comedy about four broke coworkers and their dysfunctional lives online. It’s about a temp job lasting four years too long. The dark side of your 20s. The cycles we can’t get out of. Pushing our all-consuming internet relationship to the next level. The tedium of adult life. Memes. Piercing existential dread. More memes. A universe governed by chaos. Why aren’t these memes working? Sizzling desire to find purpose. I can’t afford therapy, so I have these memes I look at. Getting hammered. HeLp ỏ̶̥͍̦́h̴̹̏͜ ̵̇̓hǹ̷̮͓̜ǒ̴̳͔̜̐̐.̵̢͍̳̎.̸̤͎̄, mY MeMEs BrOke…

But yes. All that. Now meet Rose.

Rose Gordon, 28 (played by Mitra Jouhari)

Rose is 28 going on 18 holding on to the flames of youth while keeping her personal life a hot dumpster fire of partying, red flag relationships, and impulsive pipe dreams. She’s built no foundation for herself. She knows she can’t do this forever and it scares the shit out of her.

Rose feels like the main character of her life. It creates a poisonous romanticization that the universe has something special in store for her. That said, her brand of manifestation is maniacally jamming her hands in reality. Could be stalking a celebrity to try and date them, or lying her way backstage at a concert. She goes to great lengths to feel alive and we admire her for it.

Rose has no idea how she wants her life to turn out. She’s been stuck at Super I.T. Friends for 4 years. It’s the only consistent thing she’s kept through her 20s. She swears every week she going to quit, but the job pays just enough to fuel her broke lifestyle. Her personal life is full of rotating friends, punk shows, and hobbies, but when she starts to feel too committed she blows everything up. Could be a job interview, or a new relationship, every time she gets something good going she ruins it.

Rose is in a futile battle against time. She refuses to leave her dumb 20s behind out of fear of committing to the wrong life. Rose’s long arc is growing up, walking gracefully into adulthood, and realizing change comes no matter what. Her best friend is her coworker Dutch. He keeps her laughing with juvenile humor and rides shotgun through her whimsical outings all over the city. She knows he has a crush on her but doesn’t acknowledge it.

Dutch Hughes, 27 (played by Zack Fox)

Dutch is the irreverent middle school class clown grown-up, but it’s getting depressing. We find him at the precipice of realizing his life has been unfolding into mediocrity forever. His dreams of stand-up are going nowhere. With a quiet heart of gold, he wields humor for protection. You can’t ever get hurt if you’re never taking anything too seriously.

There’s a devilish sage exterior to Dutch, but under the hood is an anxious mind too often subdued by his obsessions. Games, music, film, he’s got a million half-started ideas. Some are pretty great, but instant gratification poisons the well. He’s too appeased by little victories. His relationship with attention confuses him. The affirmation from office shenanigans feeds his ego just enough to placate him.

His daily audience are his coworkers, but more importantly, Rose who he has a huge crush on. He admires her face-first approach to life. They work together to do whatever they want on company time. It’s a slacker flirtationship. An unglamorous pact to fuck off, and though they are great friends, they’re also foils to each other.

Rose is confident and vibrant, and recklessly searching life for a purpose. Dutch has purpose, but lacks the confidence to pursue take it seriously. At times they bug each other, but more often they fill in each other’s weaknesses. Find them hip to hip using each other’s strengths to get what they want or amplify their nightmares. Throughout the show, we’ll watch Dutch take agency over his life, complicate his friendship with Rose, and waveringly traverse the digital entertainment industry.

THE WORLD: ABSTRACTly

This is about capturing the true soul of the internet. That feeling of looking at a cute cat video and then one post down is a beheading. The stupid jealousy over the illusion of someone else’s boring life. That said, it’s a satirical comedy first. It’s inspired by Rick and Morty and Broad City. Second to that is the “beheading”, the genre-bending done by shows like PEN15, Atlanta, Dave, etc. We want to use darkness, surreality, and existential dread to subvert audience expectations, and fill out the humor with some piercing realness.

We’ll tackle expected big picture stuff like AI, fake activism, influencers, and censorship, but also get micro on interpersonal things like why someone in the office unfollowed me. How come I can’t see my friend’s finsta? The weirdness of internet-only friendships. All taking place in the lives of characters who we’d want to follow even if this was set in the real world.

THE WORLD: LITERALly

This world mirrors our own. The Friends live in New Angeles which feels like New York. All the neighborhoods are social media platforms. Twitter is like Brooklyn, Instagram is like West Hollywood. Facebook is a dumpy townie suburb and Reddit is basically Time Square. The city changes with the internet. Folks around town talk about how Black Twitter is being gentrified, how more Boomers are moving into Instagram. Outside of the city are an infinite number of floating islands that hold all other conceivable isolated online communities. Basically, if it’s online, it’s anthropomorphized.

The Super I.T. Friends get sent all over the universe unglamorously. They may get to go to the internet equivalent of Fiji, but it’s probably to go unclog a spam filter and stay at The Motel 6. In their travels, we will experience the beauty of the universe. Disconnection storms, glitched-out landscapes, the dark web, the spawling infinitely generating universe. Though for them most of the time their only sense of wonder comes from when thinking about why your 50-year-old neighbor is howling(?) upstairs at 3AM. Back to our core characters.

Barney Heffernan, 31 (played by Jordan Firstman)

Barney is a displaced, identity-confused, millennial unable to accept digital reality. Mentally he’s retreated into a dated shade of earthly nostalgia. Stuck in glory days that were never his to begin with. He believes in that classic American dream, even though America is long gone.

He looks at work as a romanticized MASH deployment full of hard work and cheeky banter. He carries questionable ethics and patriotic dedication to his job. He looks at his coworkers as family and uses every chance to sign them up for company events or volunteer work to spend more time together.

He’s a virgin. Not religious, but he’s been saving himself for the right one. He confuses all attention for good attention, and has a hard time making real friends. He just wants to belong. When stress inevitably boils over from overworking, all mental hell breaks loose. It’ll end in him getting wildly drunk in the middle of work, or sobbing alone in the dark watching “That 70s Show”. Work is all he has.

Dutch acts as Barney’s office therapist. Barney swears they are the exact same person. He looks at Rose like a little sister. There’s lots of white-knighting, but Rose calls him on his bullshit. Barney’s long arc is building a life for himself outside of work, stepping into the future, and shedding his old identity.

Rookie, 20 (played by Mekki Leeper)

Never has anyone been thirstier for clout in their life. He’s the hypebeast intern with a Napoleon complex. We will never learn his true name, Rookie has felt like a loser his whole life, and since he moved to the city he’s left himself behind for the worse.

He’s a simp for money and fame. A status-seeking lump of clay. A punchable face. His primary motivation in life is to become someone. It’s gross. Underneath it all, he’s a paranoid wreck. He’s certain no one wants to see him succeed. And the haters!!! Oh, they’ll regret toying with him when he’s a billionaire playboy. He’ll buy up their houses and shoot them into the sun.

For now, he’s a part-time intern and the heel of the squad. He’s the most knowledgeable person on the team. Rookie has an extensive secret past of being a giant nerd. When he’s not busy trying to be cool, he’s a pretty decent guy. Dutch gets to privately bond with him over their respective geek hobbies. Rose likes his enabling nature and how he supports her in all her crazy schemes and party. Barney looks at himself as Rookie’s superior, it involves unsolicited advice and parental wisdom.

The show takes place just as Rookie is about to turn 21 and join a frat. Over the season we’ll watch Rookie drop out of college and jump into Super IT full-time. His long arc is accepting himself, coming to terms with his past, and letting people see him for who he truly is.

THE SUPER IT FRIENDS ORGANIZATION

Few organizations have ever been reviled more. Working at Super I.T. Friends is like being the entire universe’s janitor. The work is either insanely boring or wildly dangerous. As I said, it’s like if real life had a free customer service hotline, but then sometimes you got to break it up by putting out a black hole. No one here is getting paid enough. On an average day, you’re up at 5AM flying a crumbling space Winnebago to go pull some moron out of the Recycling Bin. After that, you’re being loaned out as security because a right-wing conspiracy theorist is giving a lecture on how Earth was never real to begin with. Then there’s the endless abyss of bureaucratic paperwork, reporting, and hotline manning. You’re a mall cop, service worker, office temp, working inside a corporate snoozefest.

The company is divided by the elderly overlords who know absolutely nothing about the technological universe they’re in charge of works, and the task force of selectively knowledgable, substance-addled youths. The office culture is dated (think Office Space). There’s a myriad of cultish work-family events and mandatory team-building experiences.  The Friends try to go out on field assignments the most because of low accountability. They’re skilled at exploiting their freedom to mess around as much as possible on company time.

OTHER OFFICE CHARACTERS

Bob - 61 (played by Marc Rebillet) – The Friend’s crass, irreverent, alcoholic boss. He’s got a family he deeply despises. Bob only cares about covering his own ass and making sure no one finds out he knows nothing about his job. He’s also having a toxic affair with the office manager Janice.

Janice - 57 (played by Steph Tolev) – Bob’s gruff secretary. She’s bitterly divorced, angry, and nosey. The Friends have a functionally contentious relationship where they join forces only if it saves them both. As for the toxic office affair with Bob, she dresses up as a spider, he dresses up as a fly. It’s weird.

Their work environment is toxic but self-contained and that’s how they like it. No one needs to know how the work gets done. Together they’ll all band together to thwart existential threats like upper management sending a liaison to evaluate their team. Could be sabotaging a more productive team to get the heat off of themselves. Deliberately making a repair situation worse to prevent a new task from getting assigned. In general, episodes will balance between their assignments and city life in tandem with their inner struggles.

EPISODE CONCEPTS

This will be a project for internet generation writers to sink their teeth into. The show has a traditional structure but isn’t going to have a rigid framework. Half an hour episodes will tell self-contained stories. Some will feel like a Futurama voyage into a new part of the universe. Others will focus on Internet city life in a Curb Your Enthusiasm sort of way. Some will be character episodes. The watching experience should be a revolver of satire, catharsis, and realness whether we’re covering fake news, a social media hiatus, or why my selfie got no likes. Here are some episode log lines.

INFLUENCER ISLAND (PILOT) – After being put on final warning, The Friends are sent to the mysterious Influencer Island to maintain the island’s planetary beautification filter. Tempted by fame and love, The Friends grapple with the dark secret of influencer island when the filter entirely fails.

OK, BOOMER – The Friends are each assigned a Boomer to transition into living online, but when Rose loses her steamrolling “Karen” can The Friends unite to save her before she destroys herself?

PASSWORD RESET – After typing the wrong password into his apartment too many times and getting locked out, Dutch goes on a late night, friend-to-friend voyage all over the city to find a place to sleep.

BACK-UP – Rose activates a time machine universe back-up from four years ago to try again with her ex, but when she realizes her life would’ve turned out even more sucky, she learns to move on.

FORTNIGHT – Against their will, Barney signs The Friends up for an unpaid weekend-long company to battle royale simulation to spend more time together.

Style & Logistics – TO BE REVAMPED–

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Zooming out further, a show about the internet will have a self-reliant ability to generate buzz. To do this effectively we would build a team of writers comprised of comedy’s emerging figureheads (Zack Fox, Brandon Wardell, etc.) and have it polished by a veteran showrunner. Done right, the show even in its purely visual moments would self-produce memes and shareable viral moments.

LAST

The heart of the internet is not some dazzling six-flags rollercoaster, it’s the New York subway system. It’s begrudgingly passed through every day, it’s a marvel of ingenuity, and eventually, you become so desensitized by it that nothing surprises you anymore. We kinda love it, but most of the time it’s because we hate it. We can be the first show to paint the internet for what it truly is, and more importantly, bring some light to it through humor.

About me

Mike Manor is an animator/director in Los Angeles. His web series “Super I.T. Squad” is out on Comedy Central featuring Zack Fox, Jordan Firstman, and Marc Rebillet. In 2021, he directed a music video for Reggie Watts and John Tejada single “Do You Even Care Anymore”. In 2020, Mike Manor creative directed the podcast “DOOMSDAY MIXTAPE” with Jak Knight and Zack Fox.