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Twitter has passed another milestone on its way to cultural domination by spawning its first television show.
CBS, the American network, will make a comedy series based on a Twitter account that is called Sh** My Dad Says, which has gained more than 720,000 followers in only a few months.
Justin Halpern, 29, the creator of the show, moved back in with his parents in San Diego and decided to feature the profane and acerbic comments of Samuel, his 73-year-old father, in a Twitter feed. He has been scribbling down his dad’s rants in a notebook since childhood.
Within weeks of the feed going live on August 3, with pearls of wisdom such as “The baby will talk when he talks, relax. It ain’t like he knows the cure for cancer and he just ain’t spitting it out”, it became a Twitter sensation, with thousands signing up daily to follow the stream of wisecracks and bitter putdowns meted out by Mr Halpern Sr.
News of the television deal came as Twitter extended its links with other social networking sites to include LinkedIn. The business-oriented social network, which has 50 million members, will allow people to share updates and tweets across both sites.
Twitter has become a cultural phenomenon, derided and lauded in equal measure, as celebrities, companies and individuals have flocked to its site. Estimates put the number of monthly users at more than 40 million, with London an international hub of Twitter activity. Last month Microsoft began to integrate Twitter messages into Bing, its new search engine, and Google announced a deal to do the same.
The partnerships mark the first big revenue stream for the microblogging service, which was founded three years ago. The company is under pressure to demonstrate that it has the business model needed to generate cash after it recently raised new venture funding valuing the company at $1 billion (£604 million).
David Kohan and Max Mutchnick, the creators of Will & Grace, the hit American sitcom, will act as executive producers and supervise the writing for the planned family comedy, which will get a new title — minus the vulgarism. Mr Halpern will script the series with Patrick Schumacker, his writing partner. Mr Halpern said that he had just “got lucky”, adding that the tweets would “frame the show” but that much of the language would have to be toned down.
His father, who has retired from a job in nuclear medicine at the University of California, San Diego, said that he did not know about the Twitter feed. He has now been told, but he never looks at the service. “He thinks it’s funny — sort of,” Mr Halpern told The Wall Street Journal. Mr Halpern Sr’s response to the CBS series was “Somebody gave you a f***ing TV deal? Who would do that?”
The Times technology team has its own Twitter feed at twitter.com/timestech
and is open to offers from TV and Hollywood producers.
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