Cavemen


 * For the species, see Cavemen (species).

Cavemen is a sitcom created by Joe Lawson for ABC, developed from the GEICO Cavemen series of commercials. As in the commercials, cavemen are an extant species separate from Homo sapiens, who live and work amongst modern society.

The series follows the lives of three cavemen named Joel, Andy, and Nick, who share an apartment in San Diego, California.

Genesis
In 2004, Joe Lawson created the GEICO Cavemen series. In the commercials, cavemen would encounter the GEICO website slogan "So easy, a caveman could do it" and become deeply offended by it. In the beginning, the commercials featured Ben Weber and Jeff Daniel Phillips (who would go on to portray Maurice in the series); later commercials have featured these and other actors in the caveman roles.

In early 2007, Variety reported that the GEICO Cavemen commercials were to be developed into a television series on ABC. After a pilot which was badly received amongst allegations that the specism experienced by the cavemen was too close to real-world racism, with use of the neologistic special slur "Magger" (derived from Cro-Magnon) attracting particular criticism.

The series was then retooled, with the offending term excised, and the locale changed from Atlanta, Georgia to San Diego, California. Aspects of the plot were also changed: Where in the pilot, Joel was seeking Kate's father's approval to marry her, in the series, their relationship is only just beginning, and Tripp McKinney remains an unseen character.

ABC description
The following is ABC's description of the series from their (now defunct) official Cavemen website.

They have been around since the dawn of time, survived the Ice Age and witnessed the evolution of the Homo sapiens, making them one of the world's oldest minorities. Keeping mostly to themselves over the millennia and living in remote communities, a small number of cavemen -- and cavewomen -- have been slowly migrating from these sub-societies and attempting to acclimate themselves to the Homo Sapien world. Needless to say, this has proven difficult.

Meet three cavemen who have successfully made the move to San Diego and are just trying to fit in. Joel is a sophisticated and intelligent man who has a beautiful girlfriend, a decent job and shares an apartment with his younger brother, Andy, and his best friend, Nick. Nick is wary of the Homo sapien world and feels like he's running away from his heritage. Andy, on the other hand, looks at this new world with his eyes wide open and is willing to take risks in order to learn and to live life to the fullest.

Nick questions Joel on many of his choices, including his girlfriend, Kate (Kaitlin Doubleday, The TV Set), a beautiful Homo sapien woman. The fact that Kate's eccentric mother, Leslie (Julie White, Tony Award winner for The Little Dog Laughed), owns Joel's condominium complex makes things even more complicated for the three roommates. Meanwhile, Kate's best friend Thorne (Stephanie Lemelin) is intent on discovering the cavemen's wilder side.

Joel, Nick and Andy have to overcome prejudice from most of the Homo sapien world and the misconceptions that modern society has of its earliest ancestors. In order for these cavemen to survive in the 21st century, they must work together to render those misconceptions extinct.

The series is based in part upon characters from the GEICO commercials by The Martin Agency. Cavemen was developed by Josh Gordon & Will Speck (directors of Blades of Glory) and Joe Lawson. Bill Martin & Mike Schiff (Grounded for Life, 3rd Rock from the Sun), Gordon & Speck, Daniel Rappaport (Office Space) & Guymon Casady serve as executive producers. Cavemen is from ABC Studios.

History
ABC aired the first six episodes of Cavemen ("Her Embarrassed of Caveman"—"Rock Vote") before the show was pulled. Though six further episodes had been produced, they were never aired on ABC; Australia's Seven Network, which picked up the show, aired all 13 episodes, including the controversial pilot which didn't see screening in the U.S. After the show's cancellation, there were some rumors of a DVD release; however as of 2010, nothing had come of them.

Main

 * Joel Claybrook (Bill English), a mature, responsible, and reliable Nörskbild employee who has successfully integrated with modern society.
 * Andy Claybrook (Sam Huntington), Joel's brother, is an immature and naive accountant with anger management issues.
 * Nick Hedge (Nick Kroll), Joel's best friend since the 7th grade, Nick is a sardonic hipster who often finds himself at odds with the Homo sapiens establishment.
 * Kate McKinney (Kaitlin Doubleday), Joel's Homo sapiens girlfriend, is a pleasant but fickle serial-dater who has dated a number of cavemen before Joel, including Maurice.
 * Thorne (Stephanie Lemelin), Kate's best friend and room-mate, is a strong-willed manizer with an occasional attraction to Andy.
 * Leslie McKinney (Julie White), Kate's mother, is a southern-accented socialite who is unashamedly cheating on her husband, who she claims is doing the same.

Recurring

 * Maurice (Jeff Daniel Phillips) is a womanizing, morally questionable friend to the group.

Themes
Much of Cavemen addresses the racism, subtle and blatant, encountered by a minority group in daily life. "Her Embarrassed of Caveman" follows Joel as he tries to deal with prejudicial attitudes about his interspecial relationship with Kate. In "Nick Get Job", Andy meets a woman in the laundry room of his apartment building who is immediately terrified of him, simply because he is a caveman. "The Mascot" principally concerns the local high school football team, the Lake Murray High Savages, whose mascot is a crude caveman stereotype named Grok-Grok whose catch phrase is "Ook! Ook!" In "Andy the Stand-Up", Andy develops a comedy routine centered around a "dumb caveman" bit which becomes popular among his sapien audience; when he tries to show that his audience enjoys his shows because he is funny, they boo and demand more "dumb caveman".

Cavemen are not portrayed as the only victims of specism, however. In "The Cavewoman", Kate is on the receiving end from the server at the local yoghurt bar, who calls her a "smoothie" repeatedly, and derides Joel for dating a sapien, essentially holding him to be a species traitor. In "Nick Get Job", Nick performs abysmally at Nörskbild and is fired, after which he unjustly claims the firing was racially motivated, drawing attention to his differing appearance as the true motivation behind the actions of the (largely innocent) Nörskbild management.

The series also explored the fact that minorities aren't necessarily extemely divergent from the cultural norms of the dominant special group: the cavemen enjoy squash, fine dining, and trendy coffee spots rather than having the presumed, unrelatable "caveman" lifestyle or character Homo sapiens ascribe to them. Cavemen dress, speak, work and play just like Homo sapiens. The urbane lives of the leading cavemen were used both as sources of comedy and as a social statement on the prejudicial attitudes of those in the majority.

Reception
Cavemen was received with a great deal of criticism. Being based on a series of advertisements (popular as they had been), as was the much-maligned Baby Bob, did not serve to help the show, and fans of the commercials were disappointed to see that Jeff Daniel Phillips did not have a leading role. After the initial pilot was perceived as racist, the reworked series was viewed as sterilised and dull by comparison. The fact that the leading cavemen were essentially three ordinary twentysomethings wearing prosthetics, without much in the way of personality traits to mark them out as cavemen, led many to call the show pointless.