by James Hibberd
February 20, 2009

Know your fall comedy pilots! Laid off? Pinching pennies? Have networks got TV for you:

* A group of friends all get fired on the same day.

* A halfway home for troubled cops.

* A Wall Street executive loses his job and has to reconnect with his small-town family.

Laughing yet? Those are a few loglines for next fall’s TV pilots. The comedy pilots. Networks are looking at recessionary ideas for their new half-hours, with several projects embracing family themes and avoiding office settings. CBS’ “Waiting to Die” is a “buddy comedy about two simple guys who are happy with their life, no matter how bad it might look from the outside.” Fox’s “Two Dollar Beer” is about a blue-collar couple in Detroit who “deal with the reality of their long-standing roots in this community slowly becoming less relevant as the rest of the world passes them by.”

Ha-ha-ha-hee-hee ... oh-oh, oh man. That’s just too much. Groups of single, perky young people seem to be waning. No more friends with benefits; they’re friends with unemployment benefits. The creative upside is that networks that rushed back to formulaic police and medical procedurals for their fall drama pilots seem to have ordered some refreshingly nontraditional-sounding comedies. Yet the police-show resurgence is getting some play here too (there are, bizarrely, four comedies in development about police officers or security guards).

Office-based shows seem less popular this time -- network executives likely figure viewers do not wish to be reminded of their workplace (or lack thereof) during a recession. In another assumption-busting move, there are plenty of single-camera comedies, accounting for nearly 40% of comedy pilots despite the traditional multicamera sitcom generally performing better in the ratings. Below is your comedy pilot guide. Turns out, it’s tougher to say something vaguely witty about comedy loglines than dramas, so I'll leave the wisecracks to you. Icons indicate Recession Theme, Family Based, Distressed Modern Woman, Workplace, Single Camera, if it's a Fairly Unique Idea and if there are Cops (yes, Defamer’s suspect cop has returned).