Super I.T. Friends

Created By: Mike Manor

INTRODUCTION

The Internet. When you literalize the World Wide Web you may imagine a saturated Wreck-It-Ralph theme park ride or maybe a hellish, post-art, sandbox. Say it was just an abstraction of Earth. Twitter is a neighborhood you live in. Google searching 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 still somehow on the ground, even though life on Earth ended ten years ago. You’re 28, hungover, going nowhere, stuck in 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 life had a customer service hotline and if you called, they’d send a band of testy twenty-somethings to give it a look. Could be getting an old lady’s HDMI connected, or a civilization-ending blackhole. All for below minimum wage! What a deal.

Super I.T. Friends is a sci-fi office comedy about four broke coworkers and their dysfunctional personal lives online. No matter how much things change, they somehow stay the same. 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…

THE UNIVERSE

The digital 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, and Instagram is like West Hollywood. Facebook is a dumpy townie suburb and Reddit is like Time Square. The city changes with the internet. Folks around town talk about how Black Twitter is being gentrified, and how more Boomers are moving into Instagram.

Through work, The Friends are sent to the furthest reaches of the universe unglamorously. It’s like getting to take a trip to Fiji, but it’s to go unclog a toilet. 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 to our friends, most of the time their only sense of wonder comes from why their 50-year-old neighbor is howling(?) upstairs at 3AM. It’s a familiarly unfamiliar world.

THE WORST JOB IN THE UNIVERSE

Working at Super I.T. Friends is like being the entire universe’s janitor/mall cop/handyman. The work is either wildly dangerous or insanely boring. 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 loaned out as security because a conspiracy theorist is giving a lecture on how Earth was never real to begin with. Then there’s an endless abyss of bureaucratic paperwork, reporting, and hotline manning.

The company is divided by the elderly bosses who know absolutely nothing about the technological universe they’re in charge of, and the task force of selectively knowledgable, substance-addled youths. The Friends prefer going 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.

THE FRIENDS

Rose, 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 into reality. Could be stalking a celebrity to try and date them, or running away with someone she just met. 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 lifestyle. Her personal life is full of rotating friends, punk shows, and hobbies, but 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 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.

Dutch, 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 is 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 great friends, they’re foils to each other.

Rose is confident and recklessly searches life for purpose. Dutch has purpose, but lacks the confidence to pursue it. 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 entertainment industry.

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 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 antics. He carries questionable ethics and dedication to his job. Barney loves the idea of a work family and uses every chance to sign The Friends up for company functions. 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 “Big Bang Theory”. Work is all he has. Dutch acts as Barney’s therapist. Barney swears they are the exact same person. He looks at Rose like a little sister which she doesn’t love. Barney’s long arc is evolving his nostalgic identity, stepping into the future, and building a life for himself outside of work.

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 thirsty for money and fame. A status-seeking lump of clay. His primary motivation in life is to become someone. 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, the heel of the squad, and the most knowledgeable person on the team. When he’s not busy trying to be cool, he’s a pretty decent guy. Dutch privately bonds with him over their nerd hobbies. Rose loves his maximalist enabling nature. Barney sees himself as Rookie’s life mentor, which involves bad unsolicited advice and moronic parental wisdom. The show takes place just as Rookie is about to turn 21. Over the season we’ll watch Rookie drop out of college and jump into Super IT full-time. His long arc is accepting himself and letting people see him for who he truly is.

THEME & StYLE

This is about capturing the timeless soul of the internet. That feeling of looking at a cute cat video and then one post down is a beheading. That said, this is a comedy first and foremost. Its humor is inspired by shows like Rick & Morty and Broad City. Second to that is the “beheading”, the genre-bending done by shows like PEN15, Atlanta, Dave. We want to use darkness, surreality, and existential dread to subvert audience expectations and fill out the humor with some piercing realness.

This will be a project for internet generation writers to sink their teeth into. Stylistically, though originally imagined in pixel art we’d pivot to traditional 2D with a warm, DIY spirit. Half an hour episodes will tell self-contained stories with some light overarching plot. 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 single character episodes. We’ll tackle big-picture stuff like AI, influencers, and censorship, but also get interpersonal, like why someone in the office unfollowed me. How come I can’t see my friend’s finsta? All taking place in the lives of characters who we’d follow even if this was set in the real world.

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 fails.

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

PASSWORD RESET – After typing the wrong password into his apartment too many times, Dutch gets locked out, and attempts to recover his password while bouncing from friend to friend on an all-night voyage 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 everyone’s will, Barney enrolls the entire office in a company-wide battle royale simulation over the weekend to spend more time together.

LAST

Ultimately, the heart of the internet is not some dazzling six-flags rollercoaster, it’s more like the New York subway system. It’s a marvel of human ingenuity that’s begrudgingly passed through every day. Eventually, you become so desensitized by it that you swear nothing can surprise 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 bring optimistic catharsis into the conversation.

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 single “Do You Even Care Anymore”. In 2020, Mike Manor creative directed the podcast “DOOMSDAY MIXTAPE” with Jak Knight and Zack Fox.