The Old Jews Telling Jokes series has been a great success, with over 200 episodes and a book under their belt. The next step? I can exclusively report that they’ll be producing a new web series, a “one-act sitcom” written by and starring some of the Old Jews that have Told Jokes for them already.
The show, tentatively titled Nag & Noodge, will be a short-form sitcom shot in front of a live studio audience. It’s being written by married writing partners Fred Rubin (who tells the joke in the above video) and Marley Sims, who have experience writing for Night Court, Diff’rent Strokes and Home Improvement between them. Rubin also teaches television writing at UCLA.
Here’s what the show will be about:
It’s about an older couple, Nate and Edye, who move from New York to Los Angeles to be closer to their grandchildren. Except, soon after they arrive, the grandkids have to move away. Their mother (Nate and Edye’s daughter-in-law) has to take a job in other state and move the family. So Nate and Edye are left in Los Angeles, trying to make sense of the place, and relying on the Internet to watch their grandkids grow up.
The plan is to do this on the cheap, with a similar production style to Old Jews Telling Jokes. Much like they do with that series, they’ll shoot an entire season of 10 seven-minute episodes of Nag & Noodge in one day. They’ll then put the show online, pushing it to the existing OJTJ audience.
“The main goal is to bring additional laughs to our audience, which is an Internet audience,” creator Eric Spiegelman told me. “If we do well to that end, and someone wants to adapt this to traditional television, hey, great. But that’s not our focus. We want to be funny on the Internet.”
