JumpStart, The Series?

I don't follow television news much, so I only just learned that Robb Armstrong's newspaper comic JumpStart had been optioned for a possible TV series. As with most attempts for a new show, a pilot was filmed to see how everything worked but CBS -- who had commissioned the pilot -- ultimately passed on things in 2023.

The show was live action with Terry Crews and Ryan Michelle Bathé in the lead roles. Crews was argueably typecast a bit here, as his character Joe was a cop, not unlike Crews' character in Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Rob Corddry was cast as Crews' partner Crunchy and was considered a "third lead." The pilot was written by Wayne Conley, who also served as executive producer. I've seen both Kelly Park's and Phill Lewis's names attached as directors. Since the project was ultimately scrapped, information is not surprisingly a bit sketchy.

Given the type of comic JumpStart is, I don't think it would've been especially difficult to translate it to a live-action sitcom. It's mostly the day-to-day life of a family and we don't see much of their actual jobs, not altogether unlike The Cosby Show. The logline for JumpStart was “Joe and Marcy are young, hip, urban parents with old school values who are willing to sacrifice for their kids and have some laughs while doing it!” Creator Robb Armstrong does sometimes include "fantastical" elements of the two infants having "normal" conversations with one another, but that's a relatively minor element of the strip and was probably dropped/ignored for the show. However, if I had to guess, I suspect that's why the show wasn't picked up.

Not that CBS was necessarily looking for a show that included talking babies, but that when you remove that element, you remove one of the 'hooks' that would've made the show stand out. It would've looked like most other family style sitcoms, and the only real defining element would've been Crews' charisma. And people already saw him as a cop in Brooklyn Nine-Nine, as I said. If the show included toddlers who spoke -- something as simple as a Look Who's Talking approach with some basic voice-overs -- it would've at least differentiated it from every other family sitcom.

Now I'm making some wild guesses here. I haven't seen the filmed pilot, so maybe it just wasn't funny. Maybe there was no on-screen chemistry between Crews and Bathé. Or Crews and Corddry. Maybe one of the actors just phoned in their performance. Maybe one of the network executives has a personal vendetta against Conley. It could be the executives felt greenlighting one show starring Black performers was plenty. (In the same round that JumpStart was axed, CBS did give the go-ahead for Damon Wayans' Poppa’s House.) But, as I said, one thing the show probably had working agaisnt it was that -- while it does stand out as unique on the comics page -- a version translated to a standard sitcom format probably comes across as "Family Matters but without Urkel."

Most TV pilots are hidden away and never get shown anywhere public, so I doubt we'll ever see the JumpStart pilot surface. But I would be curious to see how it got translated. It's a shame it didn't get picked up; I would've liked to have seen Armstrong get a little wider credit/recognition beyond the funny pages.

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