Tim Robinson’s Canceled Groupon Sitcom Has Surfaced

Tim Robinson is obviously one of the most exciting voices working in sketch comedy/faulty coffin photography today. Before the zeitgeist-dominating success of I Think You Should Leave, Robinson starred in Detroiters. Before that, he was on just one season of Saturday Night Live. And before that, he was on… an unaired sitcom about Groupon?

Robinson co-starred in Friend Me, the lost 2012 CBS show starring Christopher Mintz-Plasse, about two buddies who leave Bloomington, Indiana, for Los Angeles to start “exciting new lives” working for Groupon, presumably because Ask Jeeves wasn’t hiring that week. The series’ creation was a major news story at the time, mainly because of its confusing premise — after all, Groupon is based out of Chicago, and the term “Friend Me” is typically associated with Facebook.

While all of this seemed like a naked promotional tactic, Groupon claimed that the company had “no involvement in the pilot.” But Groupon never actually got a chance to capitalize on any of this sweet free advertising because the show was shelved after its co-creator Alan Kirschenbaum tragically committed suicide that same year.

For a long time, it seemed as though Friend Me had been lost forever, like tears in the rain or interest in the career of Rob Schneider, but recently, Friend Me, along with several other orphaned pilots, was randomly uploaded to the internet. And now we can definitively say that it’s… not great! Weirdly, in this edit of the pilot, Mintz-Plasse’s character brags that he’s scored a job at Google, not Groupon — so maybe they shot multiple versions in case Groupon went belly-up before the show was set to air? In any case, Robinson’s role is mainly relegated to the background, as one of the friends who stays behind in Indiana but still keeps in touch via webcam.

The rest of the pilot involves one of the guys putting up a personal ad in a coffee shop looking for a new friend — which mostly serves to tee up an onslaught of aggressively terrible gay panic jokes, some of which involve Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit for some reason.