Infinite Path

It seems that you can’t go anywhere at the moment without hearing about Twitter. Everywhere you go, it is still the buzzword on everyone’s lips. Even the television has, in recent months, become difficult to watch without hearing about the rapid rise in popularity of the site. News channels and sports programmes are full of references to the service and no prime time interview is complete without the respective celebrity namedropping their Twitter account. In fact, television sitcoms have been the only programmes that have tended to avoid mentioning Twitter. Until now, that is.

The American network, CBS, has announced that it will make a comedy series based on the tweets of Justin Halpern, who has amassed over 720,000 followers in just a few months. Halpern uses his Twitter feed to document the sarcastic, wry comments of his father, Samuel.

The programme will be produced by David Kohan and Max Mutchnick, the creators responsible for Will & Grace. It is being marketed as a family comedy and Halpern will script the series himself with a writing partner. However, whether the show will be able to embody the humour of Halpern’s current Twitter account (which appears to rely upon explicit language and comments of an adult nature) when it is meant for a family audience remains to be seen.
If you’re unfamiliar with Halpern’s tweets, we’ve picked a few of his best:

• “Just pay the parking ticket. Don’t be so outraged. You’re not a freedom fighter in the civil rights movement. You double parked.”
• “Why would I want to check a voicemail on my cell phone? People want to talk to me, call again. If I want to talk to you, I’ll answer.”
• “The baby will talk when he talks, relax. It ain’t like he knows the cure for cancer and he just ain’t spitting it out.”