Clerks.

Imagine if the writers if one of those insipid carbon-copy Disney sitcoms were given the idea of "Clerks" to flesh out into a half-hour comedy show without being allowed to see the actual movie. Imagine they were only given a list of character names, brief (and heavily cleaned up) descriptions of their personalities, and a few plot points to focus on.

Now imagine that the script they eventually came up with was sent through a machine called the Bland-O-Matic 2000 before given to a director with no sense of humor.

Can you picture it? Probably not, because it's way worse than that.

Everything that made "Clerks" what it was has been stripped out resulting in yet another cookie-cutter sitcom that just happens to share the same name as the Kevin Smith movie.

No Quick-Stop. No Jay and Silent Bob, no drug references (Though there are one or two instances of someone saying the word "drunk"), and basically no sleaze. It's all been Disneyed to the point of being unrecognizable. If you were to change the characters names you would never even know it wasn't just some other ultra-formulaic Disney sitcom with the exact same tired jokes as every other show they've ever produced.

You can find this thing on YouTube, but I strongly advise you not to try to get through it in one sitting. Yes, it's that bad.

If I seem angry about this it's because I am, a little. I loved the movie when it first came out and still do to this day. It was bad enough what ABC did to the "Clerks" animated series, but this thing feels like a line was crossed.

Whatever your opinion of the movie "Clerks", whether you loved it or hated it, one thing we can all agree on was that this show was BAD!

I saw the 'Clerks' sitcom. It was horrible. It takes place in a shopping mall food court and has absolutely nothing to do with the original 'Clerks' movie. Jay and Silent Bob are not in the show. The set and costumes looked like they were straight from 'Saved by the Bell' with their nasty bright colors. The plot was pretty much like any American sit-com. Dante was a whiny loser and Randal was the comic relief. There is no references to alcohol, cigarettes, sex, dead people or accidental sex with dead people. I really wish I taped it because it aired only once and I doubt that the entire show even exists in one piece anymore. I would like to have a copy to show kids some of the things we had to live through in the '90s.

Set at a shopping center consisting of convenience store Rose Market, video store Videos & More, and an Ice Cream stand, the show follows a trio of clerks for the stores Dante (Andrew Lowery) at the Rose Market, Randall (Jim Breuer) at Videos & More, and Todd (Rick Gomez ) at the ice cream stand. The trio are content to do the bare minimum for minimum wage, but Dante's girlfriend, Veronica (Noelle Parker ), wants him to try and make something of himself.

Released in 1994, Clerks, a little Indie title following the misadventures of two minimum wage clerks dealing with the tedium of working jobs where there's little to no thought became a breakout sensation. Made for around $27,000 ($250,000 after post), the movie made $3 Million in theatrical receipts from its acquisition by Miramax, and garnered critical and audience praise for its unapologetically vulgar and true to life dialogue that contemporary critics such as Gene Siskel compared favorably to Quentin Tarantino and David Mamet. Thanks to a clause in the distribution agreement the door was left open by Miramax owner Disney to adapt concepts and characters to other mediums such as TV. Produced roughly one year after the film's release, the pilot comes to us from Touchstone Television and produced and created by Richard Day of Ellen, Roseanne, and Mad About You, being adapted by sitcom people, the show while keeping the setting and characters changes them to fit the format and loses their appeal in the process.

From the opening where we're introduced to Randall, Dante, and new addition Todd, it's clear these are not the same characters as the movie. Dante doesn't carry the same exasperation as he did in the film and is much more content and is basically played by Andrew Lowery as a laid back slacker. Randall while still an abrasive character who delights in picking fights with the customers no longer has the airs of intellectual superiority he held over the customers and has been reformatted as a spastic weirdo, Todd is basically here to serve as a replacement for Jay and Silent Bob who's characterization as Drug Dealers didn't mesh with ABC's standards and practices and Todd is basically the "dumb one" of the group and has no real character other than being a slower version of this show's Dante. Noelle Parker is okay playing Dante's girlfriend Veronica, but the script is so bereft of the original film's bite that the edge from her character doesn't come through like it did in the movie.

The plot is a standard sitcom plot where there's a guy who's the same age as Dante who Veronica knows and Dante works up a scheme to take him down only for Dante to learn a lesson at the end, and it's just not all that interesting. The biggest appeal of the Clerks movie was that it felt like the characters were people you could realistically see working in those jobs (as I'm sure many of us have). At no point do the characters in Clerks the TV pilot feel "real", and from it's canned laughter to it's garish color pallet there's a reasons the show is colloquially known as "Saved by the Clerks"

The 1995 Clerks pilot isn't offensively awful, it's just standard bad sitcom. The only reason this has had the curiosity it does is because of it's association with a beloved film. The fact they thought a movie like clerks could be shoehorned into a sitcom template is an error in judgment but considering it never went to series someone had a realization. Another Clerks show, Clerks: The Animated Series would be developed 4 years later by franchise creator Kevin Smith and while it does diverge even further from the format of the movie, it is at least aware of it and makes the exaggerations and divergences a running joke in the series.

I'm not quite sure how this would even work, but this sitcom pilot was made without prior knowledge (let alone consent) of Kevin Smith. He did write and direct the movie this is supposedly based on, but informing him about this spin-off seemed a bridge too far. In all fairness though: this barely has anything to do with the movie, which begs a lot of questions. "Clerks" was an underground hit, but is it really so famous that merely using its name gets you great ratings? And wouldn't actual fans of the movie turn this of after five minutes, noticing that the only thing it has in common is a store setting and characters named Dante and Randall (they don't even have Jay and Silent Bob)? There are really only two quite fascinating things about this pilot. The constant waves of canned laughter after lines you didn't even identify as jokes, and the fact that SNL alumnus Jim Breuer is in this playing Randall. Apart from that, this might just be the longest half hour of your life.

according to the View Askew message boards this show never aired, the only people who have seen this is the ABC executives, Kevin Smith, Scott Mosier, and Vincent Pirerra. it had no cursing and no jay and silent bob so they decided not to air it. whoever it was that said he bought the DVD thats a different show, thats the ANIMATED tv show