‘The Room’ Director Tommy Wiseau Returns With New Sitcom
It’s been over a decade since we first entered The Room, but the cult midnight movie still draws legions of new fans and the legend around its mysterious auteur/creator Tommy Wiseau continues to build. James Franco will both direct and attempt to portray the off-kilter Wiseau in The Disaster Artist, a film about The Room‘s nightmarish production based on actor Greg Sestero’s book. Now, Wiseau is back with a new project of his own: A sitcom called The Neighbors.
Remembering ‘The Room’: Q&A With Greg Sestero
The Dissolve reports that The Neighbors was once a failed television pilot that will supposedly find a second life on Comedy TV this September. Wiseau hasn’t exactly been out of the public eye since The Room — at one point, he was doing video game reviews on YouTube — and The Neighbors doesn’t appear to be an elaborate joke. There’s an official website, an Instagram, a Twitter account… this might be legit.
According to the show’s synopsis, The Neighbors is a sitcom about the relationship between inhabitants of an apartment building. Even the synopsis is written in classic Wiseau-isms: “This cocktail of characters always guarantee [sic] plenty of surprises. The demographic is all inclusive.” In the pilot episode, a character named Marianna is “obsessed about bugs in her apartment,” while Monica catches her boyfriend, Den, in bed with a dude named Patrick. (The name “Den” might be a callback to the legendary Denny character from The Room. Maybe we’ll finally learn how his career in the drug trade has progressed.) If anything, the apartment setting will allow for countless “Oh hi Monica” and “Oh hi Patrick” jokes.
However, the preview scene that was unveiled earlier this week is incredibly nonsensical even by Wiseau standards: The writer/director/star — apparently portraying an Iggy Pop-looking stoner named Ricky Rick; he lives in Apartment 420, get it? – is throwing a Tommy Wiseau underwear party, complete with underwear that says “Tommy U.S.A. Wiseau” on it, while the “Lola” character keeps hawking “Tommy Wiseau dot com.” So The Neighbors exists in a world where Tommy Wiseau himself doesn’t exist (he’s Ricky Rick in the Neighbors universe), but his name, website and personalized underwear do. It’s these kinds of meta conundrums that’ll have Room fans flocking to this “sitcom,” even if it does look like it’s a notch below a poorly produced softcore porno.