2000s Sitcom Inspired By An Insurance Commercial Is More Disappointing Than Your Deductible

By Robert Scucci
| Published 43 seconds ago

If there’s one thing I hate more than anything else in the world, it’s insurance. All kinds. To me, and hopefully to you, insurance is a big bully hovering over you at all times saying, “Hey, want to feel safe and secure in life? Well, it’s gonna cost ya. Oh, and when something bad happens, it’s also going to cost you, even though you’ve been funneling money to us for decades.” Little did I know that this past weekend, I’d finally find something more disappointing than my deductible, and it’s the short-lived 2007 sitcom, Cavemen.

In case you’re wondering why I opened with a rant about how much I hate insurance, it’s not because I’m having a stroke. Cavemen, and the characters in it, didn’t start out as a sitcom. It started as a Geico commercial. In the commercial, the spokesperson says, “It’s so easy to use Geico.com, a caveman could do it.” Then the camera pans over, revealing that a crew member working on the set is a caveman, and he storms off because the joke is that the spokesman basically used a slur against his species.

I’ll admit it: when these commercials were making the rounds, I laughed. They’re funny in that “haha, that’s so random” kind of way. One thing I didn’t think, however, was, “Wow, I really hope they make a sitcom out of this.” Just like I don’t want to pay out of pocket for a rental car while I wait to get reimbursed like the last time I got rear-ended, I didn’t want to sit down with Cavemen while winding down this past weekend. But I do this for a living, and for the love of the game, so let’s get into it, shall we?

From Geico Commercial To Commercial Failure

The premise to Cavemen is about as stupid as you’d expect. We’re introduced to brothers Joel (Bill English) and Andy (Sam Huntington) Claybrook, along with their pretentious, know-it-all, dissertation-writing roommate Nick (Nick Kroll). As the show’s lore explains in the intro sequence ahead of every episode, cavemen were never fully replaced by modern humans, but instead integrated as a subspecies coexisting alongside them. In other words, they’re minorities, and this is where the alleged humor is supposed to come from.

Nick is a grad student with a superior intellect, while Joel and Andy hold down jobs and try to survive the dating scene. They live in a modern apartment and play Nintendo Wii. They stick together because they feel ostracized, and the gags are written in the same style as the Geico commercials. The boys go about their lives, realize they don’t belong, stare at the camera in disgust, and then learn a thing or two.

For example, when Nick takes on a substitute teaching job, he discovers that the school’s mascot is a caveman and completely loses it. When the mascot follows him around during an event, pantomiming caveman behavior, Nick beats it silly with its own club, only to discover he just beat the hell out of a high school girl. Then, he has to face public scrutiny because the most common stereotype is that cavemen are aggressive. Real high-brow stuff.

As much as our protagonists preach tolerance, though, they have no problem cannibalizing their own. They discriminate against “shavers,” fellow cavemen who shave their entire bodies to blend in with Homo sapiens. Whenever they run into an alleged shaver, they make it clear they’re superior for refusing to assimilate with modern humans. They even suggest that musician John Tesh is a shaver, which makes them feel conflicted because they identify with his music on a primal level but are ashamed that he doesn’t fully embrace his inner Cro-Magnon.

How Did This Get 13 Episodes?

What’s truly baffling to me is how Conan O’Brien’s Lookwell was unceremoniously shelved after its pilot aired in 1991, but Cavemen essentially got a full season. I guess they had plenty of that sweet, sweet Geico money floating around to make that happen, but I’m just cracking wise here. The series, developed by Joe Lawson, Josh Gordon, and Will Speck (we need to call them out whenever the opportunity presents itself), plays out like those awkward Big Bang Theory clips with the laugh track removed. 

The jokes are awkward, their use of the word “Magger” as a prehistoric slur is a ridiculous portmanteau, and the humor is painfully one-note, almost like it worked better in the context of a 20-second commercial than a 22-minute sitcom episode.

If you want to watch Cavemen out of morbid curiosity alone, it’s nowhere to be found on any major streaming platform. My recommendation is to head over to the series’ Wikipedia page and search the episode titles on YouTube. The entire series has been uploaded by various users (God bless them), though some episodes are broken into three parts. If you’re willing to put in the effort as I did and watch a good 75 percent of this series, I have the number for a pretty good therapist when you’re done. The barrier to entry alone should tell any sane person to leave this one buried.