Super I.T. Friends
Created By: Mike Manor
Super IT Friends is a show about being behind.
It’s about the ugly side of your 20s, a temp job lasting four years too long, the futile battle against the tedium of adult life. How we create meaning in the vast nothingness and how we continue when the things that were supposed to work out don’t.
10 years ago the earth died. The resulting action was a mass migration inside the internet via janky wifi-router. C’est la vie. No matter how much things change they always stay the same.
Our story follows four coworkers who have stayed the same. Each afflicted with a different curse of youthful stagnation. Watch them avoid getting fired, make stupid decisions, and lose their minds inside the internet as we know it.
It must be stated that this internet universe has no novelty to our characters. It’s business as usual, money has to be made, rent is still due. Yes doing a Google Search is like going to the DMV, and Memes are A-list celebrities, but the online surreality takes a backseat to sobering earthly woes.
In this case, it’s the most thankless job in the entire universe: Super I.T. Friends.
Super I.T. Friends is a swindling “Geek Squad” service that “100% guarantees ;)” to fix any universe problem by dispatching teams of undertrained workers. More on that later but now: Meet Rose
Rose Gordon (played by Mitra Jouhari)
27, impulsive, virtuous
A friend who would defend you even if you were wrong. A temper you love and fear. Disorder may be the only thing that makes her feel alive.
Rose is the supervisor of her group of flunky coworkers. This is her 5th year at Super IT Friends, and she has passionately hated the company the entire time. Her sheer continued presence at work is an act of spite. There is no turn where she doesn’t think of how to stick a knife the company’s side or use their resources for her own gain. Rose is not always such a pistol though, and often times she’s completely weighed down by her utter exhaustion with the way her life is turning out.
Five years ago, Rose naively bought into Super IT Friends under the virtue of helping others, but it didn’t take long to learn about the unethical dumpster fire it truly is. In turn, she’s made it her moral mission to see the company into the ground. That said she gets along with her coworkers pretty well, and looks at them as a band of misfits.
Rose is primarly plagued by her undying angst!!! Could be getting a spontaneous tattoo, or ditching town with someone she just met. Hyper-focusing on volunteering or joining some weird club. She’s always switching it up. Everything is a big deal, everything is a cosmic battle against right and wrong. On the flip side, she’s always down to take another shot of tequila.
Dutch Hughes (played by Zack Fox)
25, hazy and vivacious
Dutch has been a repair tech at Super IT Friends for the last two years. Despite being quite good, he has instead mastered doing whatever he wants on company time. He spends his days researching web conspiracy theories, writing comedy, and thinking of ridiculous ideas for things to do when the friends are inevitably sent out on a field assignment.
He’s a people pleaser, and a flirt, but he’s made too easily content by his passive wit. Despite being clever, he’s big fish in a small pond. He’s comprised of all the raw materials to become great, but at some point, you stop becoming and just end up what you made yourself. It’s almost too late, but not yet. Internet comedy glory is where his heart lies, but it’s a long humbling road ahead.
He’s also got a soft spot for Rose. She’s got the scrappy passion and fervor for life he deeply admires. She loves his sage temperament and middle school humor. They offer each other balance but equally disorder. We’re talking about two huge egos with different life philosophies. They butt heads regularly and drag everyone into their petty squabbles but there is something cosmic between them. We will witness them date others, get hurt, become jealous, hold back. All while quietly slowly growing something underneath it all.
THE WORLD: ABSTRACTly
Super IT Friends is first and foremost a satirical comedy. Beyond the jokes and banter are deeply flawed characters. The show is equally plot and character-driven in a sort of Rick and Morty/Futurama way. Episodes will focus on their inner struggles in addition to complimenting big picture subject matter like online superficiality, cancel culture, blackfishing, deep fakes, etc.
Above all, we are not portraying the internet as a Wreck-It-Ralph theme park ride. Our true relationship is much more grating and desensitizing. The placid overworld is ordinary city life online, and dumpy office job culture. The chaotic underworld is made up of their messy personal lives and dangerous field assignments. Episode strucuture will have a roulette approach in storytelling with some episodes focusing on one character, others being more plot-driven, some may have genre switches or just hone in on certain character relationships. This will make episodes feel fresh and surprising (season two of Atlanta does this exceedingly well.)
Secondary to the comedy will be notes of existential dread, action, darkness, and deep surreality. Always to push, but never to betray the characters. Despite general clean plot resolution our characters are malleable albeit slowly. Look at it like Workaholics wrapped in a sci-fi blanket.
Each season will have its own light arc. Half an hour episodes will always tell self-contained stories. This will be a place for internet generation writers to cut their teeth. Audiences ought to feel heard and understood after watching, whether we’re covering fake news, a social media hiatus, or why my selfie got no likes. The ultimate goal is to inject multifaceted humor and catharsis into all those depressing conversations about how technology gets us further away from-blah-blah-blah. Now for more characters.
THE WORLD: LITERALly
This is a world that mirrors our own. The Friends live in the patchwork city of New Angeles. The city’s neighborhoods mirror large social media platforms. There’s a Hollywood district that acts like Instagram, a New York section that feels like Twitter, and a dumpy suburb that is obviously Facebook. Outside of the city are an infinite number of floating islands that hold all other conceivable online communities. Basically, if it’s online it’s physically represented or anthropomorphized.
The absurdity of digital life is not a spectacle to the characters, just the audience. Lore exists but does not have a forward-facing role. Much like how you don’t need to know about the Gulf War to watch Seinfeld. That said, here is a paragraph for the curious:
The VR universe was poorly coded on a shoestring budget by a narcissistic billionaire after earth turned into a garbage pail. It’s absolutely brimming with glitches and exploits. These errors are regularly abused by scammers, hackers, trolls which make up a large amount of the office work our characters deal with. Additionally, because it’s expensive to upload a person online, all but the rich have been forced to take out wildly predatory loans to save themselves. So yes, we do still live in a debt-fueled economy where public infrastructure is crumbling. This weight does play a role in our protagonist’s lives and is what keeps them at their objectively horrible job.
Anyways back to our characters…
Barney Heffernan (played by Jordan Firstman)
29, oafish, impulsive
To understand Barney is to understand one thing: he is entirely motivated by belonging.
He’s worked at Super IT Friends for over nine years and is surely the only one who loves it. He looks at the whole company like a romanticized MASH military deployment where he’s the cheeky veteran who works hard, parties harder, and is always up for a rabble-rousing prank ;) In reality, he’s a stump-brained try-hard who is horrible at his job, but can’t be fired. This is due to an illegal workplace injury that left him unable to read yet miraculously he can write. This makes his lifelong dream of becoming the next Tom Clancy sensitive and complicated.
His desire to fit in makes him easily manipulated, this and many other lizard brain tendencies constantly require close supervision by Rose. Fortunately for him, he’s more fun off the clock than a pain in the ass on the clock.
Rookie (played by Mekki Leeper)
20, unexposed, doe-eyed
We will never learn his name. He’s the intern with a Napoleon complex. The voice of reason and the heel of the group. Rookie’s past is deeply complicated. He was homeschooled in a polyamorous home with thirteen helicopter dads and one mom who abandoned the family when he was eleven. His angst to validate himself makes him vulnerable to do anything for money, fame, and glory.
Oh, but how the hand of life slaps you down. His below average grades have landed him in the worst internship of all time. The Friends look at him as their younger brother who they beat upon. Barney especially loves Rookie and has taken him under his wing with an undesired dose of fraternal love. Despite him being a smarmy little dweeb, he’s pretty good at his job. Even just that little bit of self-knowledge gives him enough ego to keep himself afloat.
OTHER CHARACTERS
Bob - 61 (cold, flippant) – Their soulless alcoholic boss. He is completely and entirely serves himself. He has no regard for the ethical or moral problems incurred on the job. He only cares about covering his ass and the work off his plate. He’s also having an affair with the office manager Janice whom he completely despises.
Janice - 57 (aggressive, weathered) – She’s the office manager and the person who keeps the entire company afloat. She is profoundly intimidating and boisterous. Her entire job is to keep everyone accountable and spy on them. Her affair is extra strange with Bob. He’s wildly rude to her during work hours and is constantly accusing her of plotting to kill him in his sleep. Oh, she hates him, but she gets to be the dom in their BDSM relationship so it all equals out.
THE SUPER IT FRIENDS ORGANIZATION
Super IT Friends is the most hated job in the entire universe and is the constant scapegoat for all of society’s problems. The public at large basically thinks they’re a bunch of idiots who waste tax dollars and do nothing all day which is mostly true. The Friend’s days are typically spent on the phone dealing with rude clients, prank calls, confused boomers, and a handful of depressed regulars who call just to say what’s up. The office culture is classically dated (think Workaholics or The Office) but once in a while, the friends get a chance to leave the headquarters and go on their wildly unsafe field assignments.
Field assignments involve dispatching teams of untrained employees to fix anything from a broken printer to a black hole. Additionally, they handle community service, like running a free universe intro course for boomers or cleaning up Old Lady Higgen’s bloated AOL inbox. All while traveling for days on end in a dumpy, live-in, space Winnebago. Despite that, The Friends love field assignments because there is no oversight. They’re skilled at exploiting their freedom to mess around as much as possible. Field Assignments make up a majority of episode set-ups.
Style & Logistics
No one will have ever seen anything quite like this stylistically. I’ve spent the last several years perfecting a dynamic approach to pixel art that incorporates nuanced expression, depth of field, and versatile camera work. Pixel art not only contains an aesthetic that combos well with this universe, but it yields a number of tremendous workflow/cost advantages. Art is drawn in full color. Art assets can be easily stored and repurposed. Character animations can be reutilized as easily as copy and paste. This will allow the animation to be beautiful and nuanced while allowing us to allocate more resources to writing.
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 comedies emerging internet age figureheads (Jak Knight, Zack Fox, Brandon Wardell, Quinta Brunson, etc.) and have it polished by a Dan Harmon-like showrunner. Done right, the show even in its purely visual moments would self-produce memes and sharable viral moments.
Behind the scenes, the show creation and staffing will be morally aligned with our current social era. Casting will also reflect this with an emphasis on at least two of the four leading roles being POC.
LAST
The heart of the internet is not some dazzling six-flags rollercoaster, it’s the New York subway system. You begrudgingly pass through every day, it’s a marvel of human ingenuity, and eventually, you become so desensitized by it nothing surprises you anymore. We love it for some reason, and half 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. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to shave off a few more years of my life in development and give it hell.
About me
Mike Manor’s work has been featured in Sundance, IFC, and E3. He has worked on projects with Netflix, Comedy Central, Adobe, and Westbrook Studios. Mike has worked with artists such as Zack Fox, Jak Knight, Anthony Fantano, Flying Lotus, Denzel Curry, Pi’erre Bourne, Young Nudy, 88Rising, Stonesthrow Records, Bethesda. Mike enjoys writing, hiking, music, and being a good person.