From Beloved Geico Commercials to Disastrous ABC Sitcom: An Oral History of ‘Cavemen’

The Geico Commercials

Joe Lawson, co-creator of the Geico Cavemen and the Cavemen sitcom: In 2004, I was working for The Martin Agency in Richmond, Virginia. We had Geico as a client, and they were just introducing Geico.com — back then, the idea that you could go online and buy insurance was revolutionary. And so, the strategy was to just tell people that using the website was easy and simple. 

I was the writer, and my partner was an art director named Noel Ritter. When brainstorming, we would just sit around in a room for hours on end, and while we were working on this one, he said, “‘It’s so easy, a caveman can do it’ — what if we just do that?” From there, we started spitballing: “Okay, we’ll have these cavemen and we’ll pretend that they’re still around and Geico thinks they’re idiots, so they take offense.”

At the time, everything was becoming politically correct, so we thought, “Let’s comment on that. Everyone is offended at this point, even cavemen, who we didn’t even know existed.” He came up with that tagline, and I took it in the direction of these guys being really offended and Geico having to apologize to them.

We had a great relationship with Geico. They were super easy and very laid back. They loved comedy, and they knew being funny would separate them from everyone else. When it came to the cavemen, they immediately liked it and gave it the thumbs up. We went to L.A. and made the first three commercials. We had really good actors who were great at being dry. My whole thing was that they have to be super dry, like British humor. The British Office was huge at the time, so I kept telling everyone it needed to be like that. It needed to be downplayed.

Like with writing anything, my initial thought about these commercials was no one is going to care. But then I started seeing positive feedback, and I was like, “People actually watch this shit?” Advertising Age thought it was good. Adweek thought it was good. The online reaction was positive too. Then we did more ads that got an even better response. I wrote a script and turned it into a TV show — a TV show which, for a while, I thought had ruined my life.

The Cavemen Come to ABC

Lawson: I knew I wanted to try to become a TV writer, and I had written some sketches for Comedy Central. One day, I was talking to these Comedy Central people, saying, “I do have this idea based on these commercials.” They had seen the commercials and liked them, and I said, “What if we turn it into a TV show?” They said, “Write something up,” and I did. 

Before I sent it to them though, I sent it to Will Speck and Josh Gordon, who had directed all of the commercials. They said, “Woah! You need an agent. You can’t just pitch this; you’re going to get taken advantage of. Also, we want to be part of it.”

They helped me get an agent, and we developed a formal, professional pitch. My pitch was basically that cavemen still exist and they’re constantly affronted. They don’t know how to live in this modern world, and they take everything as offensive to them and they’re treated like second-class citizens. We pitched it to everybody — the major networks and Comedy Central. The sad thing is, ABC bought it. Comedy Central wanted it, but we didn’t sell it to them, which we should have because ABC was a disaster.

When we got hired, none of us — me, Will or Josh — had done TV, so the network wouldn’t let us run the show, which is normal. They hired Bill Martin and Mike Schiff from 3rd Rock from the Sun to run the show, and they were the executive producers. I was a co-executive producer — that title meant nothing though. I didn’t run the room. I didn’t rewrite scripts. I was powerless, which was frustrating. This happens to everybody, especially if you’re new. You’ve got to hand over your little baby and somebody else gets to raise it, or run it into the ground, which is what they did.

Before ABC decided if Cavemen was going to be a series, they wanted to shoot a pilot, which we did and I thought it was awful. They took the script I wrote — which was about the cavemen at a country club and there’s a culture clash — and completely rewrote it. 

Bill Martin, executive producer on Cavemen: When Mike and I came onto Cavemen, the pilot was written and mostly cast. I think even the locations were set. It was pretty far along. The ship was already sailing.

Mike Schiff, executive producer on Cavemen: We did do a rewrite on the pilot. We had three days after the table read before we started shooting. We added a new beginning, but we didn’t change much of the big set pieces that were already in there. Bill and I were trying to be respectful of the guys who had sold the show and respectful of the fact that ABC had bought it, so we didn’t do a big rewrite. 

That said, after the pilot was done, everybody felt like maybe it should have been conceived a little differently. So, even though the show got picked up, everybody felt like the pilot wasn’t exactly what we wanted to do with the series. 

Lawson: The original tone was super dry and low-key, but ABC made it into this glossy, super-colorful super-broad comedy. The only way Cavemen worked was if it was subtle. We wanted single-cam, low-key, dry, British humor. ABC wanted Cavemen to be a 3rd Rock from the Sun-type comedy, so they hired the guys who worked on 3rd Rock. I got along fine with those guys and they were great at multi-cam sitcoms, but it was two completely different sensibilities. If you make Cavemen into a broad comedy, then it’s a hat on a hat. It became absurd.

Schiff: The president of ABC when Cavemen was on was Steve McPherson, and Steve was a lower-level NBC executive when Bill and I were doing 3rd Rock. When they bought Cavemen, I think Steve made the connection to Bill and I because 3rd Rock was a high-concept show and so was Caveman. But it was tricky because they weren’t really the same. On 3rd Rock, the Solomons looked like us, but they were aliens, so they acted weird. Cavemen, however, was almost the inverse. They looked weird, but acted normal. But it’s easier to write weird behavior than normal behavior. 

Lawson: After the pilot was shot, ABC picked up the series, but I said I wasn’t going to be a part of it. I thought it would be really embarrassing, which it was. I finally caved and stayed because I had a lot of people telling me, “Even if the show fails, it’s still a doorway into what you want to do in becoming a TV writer.” I had all kinds of managers and agents telling me, “This is your only shot.” 

Becoming a Caveman

Tony Gardner, makeup effects artist on Geico Cavemen commercials and Cavemen sitcom: Will Speck and Josh Gordon hired me to do the very first cavemen commercials for Geico — I still do them today, actually. I was also asked to do the TV show, but right from the start, production had all these weird rules. Like, before we shot the pilot, we were told that the makeup from the commercials “looks too Caveman-y” and it had to be toned down. 

Lawson: The poor fucking actors, man. It was five hours every day to get the makeup on, then it would take three hours to get it all off. It just shouldn’t have been a TV show. It couldn’t bear its own weight. These guys were in makeup and hair for eight hours a day, plus shooting 12 hour days, so all the actors had mental breakdowns. 

Bill English, Joel Claybrook on Cavemen: My call time every day was 3 a.m. Eventually, we got the process down to three-and-a-half hours every morning for the makeup for the face, the wig and the hair. But if you had to wear shorts — there were a lot of scenes where we played squash with the short shorts and short sleeves — we needed these sheets with hair woven into them. They had to wrap them around our legs and glue a seam up the back. 

Schiff: One day, our line producer called and said, “We’re out of arm hair.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “We can’t get any more for two weeks.” I said, “So what do we do?” He said, “You’ve got to write them in scenes with long sleeves on.” It was craziness. 

Gardner: Yes, we ran out of hair. We used this stretch hair, this stretch-weave gauze that you can see through that has hair attached. You wrap it around peoples’ arms and legs, and glue it on the backside where the sides meet. There’s one company in Boston that makes it, and you had to order it six weeks out. So we’d insist they tell us beforehand, but every week, we’d have a new director that would think it’d be funny to put them in really short shorts. And if they didn’t get to that scene on the day of filming, it was ruined because you couldn’t use the hair the next day. It was all one-time use.

Play

English: Once you’re in the caveman mask, you feel like you’re trapped in there, and no one really gets it other than the other guys in the makeup in the scene with you. It was like going to war together. The three of us — me, Nick Kroll and Sam Huntington — bonded really quickly because of it. Man, it gives me the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it again.

Gardner: Nick Kroll developed an allergy to foam latex pretty quickly into production. We had to switch to silicone, which was just being figured out at the time. 

Lawson: There were days when actors wouldn’t come out of their trailers because they were over it. As much as I was over it as a writer, they were even more over it because they were taking the brunt of the abuse. I get it, though: They were wearing this hair and makeup, they were hot all the time and then they’ve got to go deliver this shitty dialogue.

English: Also, before we went home at night, they gave us this really intense medical moisturizer that they give to burn victims to soothe your skin before you have to wake up four hours later to shoot the next day. It was an intense process.

Scott Marder, writer on Cavemen: Everyone was in makeup so much that it affected the workday. There are union rules that you can’t start until 12 hours after the actors got out of makeup, so each day had to push the next day’s start time later and later. By the end of every week, we were in a completely upside-down night shoot — and not because there were night scenes, we couldn’t start until then, and we’d film well into Saturday. It was just from the turnaround of them being in the makeup. It was killing the cast; it was killing the crew. It was unsustainable. 

The 2007 Television Critics Association Summer Meeting

Lawson: After shooting the pilot, while we were writing the rest of the episodes, there was the summer meeting of the Television Critics Association. It was me, Will, Josh and the two 3rd Rock guys. We did hair and makeup, and I thought it was going to be fun.

Schiff: We could read the room, and we had anticipated cynicism about a show based on a commercial. We knew we were going to have a target on our backs because of that. I remember waiting backstage, and Steve McPherson coming back and saying, “It’s a hostile crowd,” which wasn’t surprising to us. But we got up there anticipating that they were going to say, “You hacks”; instead what they said was, “You racists.” I wasn’t prepared for that at all.

Lawson: The press thought it was an allegory. They thought it was a commentary on race — Black people specifically — so we got killed right out of the gate. It was five white dudes up there, getting hammered with questions like, “Who are you to speak on this?” We were saying, “It’s not an allegory, it’s not about race,” and they were saying, “How is it not about race?” We didn’t really have an answer. We were ill-prepared. 

Marder: The show was about Cro-Magnon men, and one question they got was, “Can we talk about the term ‘Maggers’ that you guys are throwing around? That sounds a lot like another word.”

Martin: I was taken aback by how sharp the knives were, but my main memory of the event was Mike opening his mouth and me thinking, “No, no, no! The creators of the show are right over there!” We were the hired hands brought on to give this thing shape. Why, Mike, have you asked to have the bomb thrown to you?

Schiff: Smartly, Bill thought to sit back, but I thought, “Let me explain why you’re wrong” to the critics. It wasn’t successful. 

We’d come from the writers’ room that morning, so, in my head, I had the story ideas we’d been breaking that morning, including one where Nick Kroll’s character gets a job at the Ikea-like store and he doesn’t want to work. I’m explaining about the show and the different characters and stories and I get to Nick and I go, “It’s about this guy, and he’s lazy.” And as I’m hearing the word “lazy” come out of my mouth, I’m thinking, “I wish I hadn’t said this word.” The silence I heard when I called Nick Kroll — not a Black man — “lazy” was deafening. 

Now, I’m sensitive to these things. My first job was In Living Color; I run The Neighborhood now. Being sensitive to these things is part of my job, but I thought that the criticism was unfair. I still think it was unfair. The cavemen were supposed to be a minority, yes, but they were an invented minority. We were taking experiences from any minority. There was an episode based on me, as a Jewish writer, going to work on the High Holy Days. Our assistant at the time was Korean, and she was marrying a white man. We used that too. We were trying to amalgamate all these things, but they reduced it to us mocking Black people. 

Obviously, though, we had to be more sensitive than we were being. There was something going on with this show that we didn’t anticipate — maybe naively.

Lawson: We kept saying, “It’s not about race!” but, in retrospect, I guess it accidentally was and that’s something I know nothing about. 

Rob Rosell, writer on Cavemen: Once that question about race was asked, it was totally clear how someone could ask that question. It was a blind spot in the fog of war of making the show. 

The ‘Cavemen’ Go On

Martin: After the TCAs, we were definitely scared to steer into the controversy, which was hard because that’s what the cavemen were — they were a cultural racial group that had a beef with the way they’re perceived. And so, it was tough to go from making a show about that to making a show about regular dudes with heavy beards. It took all the wind out of our sails.

Peter Saji, writer on Cavemen: When I first met with Bill and Mike, I was told that the cavemen were going to basically be every minority — with Jewish experiences, Black experiences, female experiences and so on. Every marginalized group would get to see themselves in the cavemen, but I don’t think we got to do that, especially not after the TCAs. After that, ABC got scared and took out all the teeth. 

Rosell: Scott Marder and I thought the show seemed like a big swing that could have been a weird, non-traditional sitcom on a network. But when it left the theoretical stage and we started doing the show, it was clear it wasn’t really popping. They were doing it as a regular network sitcom on ABC with normal ABC music and had the normal ABC color palette. That worked for some things, but there was a dryness to the commercials that we ended up not embracing on the show, which made it hard to swallow. We started doing stories that could have been on any ABC show. It became a very traditional, toothless sitcom. 

Schiff: What the network wanted changed a lot. “Do we want to make it more like the commercials, or do we want to make it less like the commercials?” We’d also hear things that allegedly came from the top, but you weren’t sure if it was something McPherson said in passing, something he actually felt passionate about or if it was even really coming from him? There was certainly confusion about what this show was supposed to be. 

Marder: We’d heard that McPherson said, “It can be nothing like the commercials!” For example, some of the commercials had Talia Shire as a therapist, and we thought we could use her as a Lorraine Bracco-type character for the cavemen to confide in. But because she was from the commercials, we couldn’t use her. 

Later on, we ended up hearing that McPherson liked slapstick humor. It wasn’t even an official note, he just mentioned it offhand, and this got run down the chain that “Cavemen needs more slapstick! That’s what we need, that’s how we save the show and win McPherson back!” 

For one, that’s not those ads, and that wasn’t the vibe we were doing. I remember the staff being like, “This won’t save the show. This is another wrinkle that makes the show bad.” So now, we were obligated to find this weird physical humor in every episode that not necessarily any of the actors can even do. By the time that came down, though, we were already at the point where we were laughing at how chaotic the show was.

Lawson: Halfway into it, Will and Josh were fired by ABC. It was a conflict of sensibilities. After that, I felt like a dead man walking. I even called our executive at ABC, and I was like, “What am I supposed to do?” She said, “You do your fucking job, that’s what you do.” I laid low for the rest of the season. I was by myself with no support. I was bitter, too. I remember thinking, “I hope there’s a writers’ strike so we don’t have to do this anymore,” since there had been talk of a writers’ strike for almost a year. I was hoping for a strike so I could go back to Virginia and pretend it never happened. 

The Dawn on ‘Cavemen’ on ABC

Schiff: It was decided that the pilot wasn’t going to be the first episode to air. The episode that we chose, which Bill and I wrote, wasn’t much of anything because we were so scared of our own shadow while writing it. The episode was the result of all that second guessing we did after the TCAs. Instead of making any choices, we backed away from every choice, and that episode was boring and not funny enough — and it was our premiere. 

Saji: We had a major premiere — something like nine million people tuned in. But they tuned in to watch a car crash, and they got to see the car crash they were waiting to see.

Lawson: When it debuted, it didn’t get the same response that it got at the TCAs. Honestly, that might have been better, since it actually might have been newsworthy. Instead, it was just ignored. ABC also hated it. They saw it as a blemish. 

Schiff: The response to the premiere was, “This is every bit as bad as we thought,” and internally, we knew that we’d taken a shot and it didn’t hit. People were depressed about it, because that show was a lot of work. We hoped people would give us another shot because we had better episodes coming up, but at that point, the damage was done. 

Rosell: When the strike started in November 2007, we walked out of Cavemen right onto the picket line. 

Marder: Ironically, I think the strike bought the show more time because they needed more content. Normally, for a show doing that poorly, it would have been two episodes and then it would be dead. 

Lawson: We went on strike, but we had two more episodes left to shoot. I did no writing, but I did show up to the stage every day. We continued to produce episodes, but the writers’ room was gone because they were on strike. We made 13 episodes total, but only seven actually aired. I haven’t seen all of them. I hated this show so much right out of the gate.

Schiff: Funny enough, Cavemen was never really canceled. It was just pulled off the schedule. The network kept saying, “It’s coming back,” but it wasn’t and we knew it wasn’t. I mean, why would they bring it back?

Martin: That’s true with every show. Maybe in the olden days they’d say, “You’re canceled,” but now they say, “Yeah, so you’re off the schedule, but summer’s coming up so you never know.” But it’s a charade. As far as I’m concerned, Cavemen isn’t canceled, and we may have to go back to work at any time.

Lawson: After Cavemen failed, I moved back to Virginia. I tried to get my advertising job back, and they were like, “Go fuck yourself.” The Martin Agency was very bitter because I’d acquired the rights to the cavemen to do the show. Geico owned the rights, but I, with the help of my manager and lawyer, optioned the rights to the cavemen from Geico. So Geico signed a document allowing me to do a TV show using the cavemen and that they’d have zero creative input. I understood that and Geico understood that, but the Martin Agency executives didn’t understand it. When I left to do the TV show, they were flabbergasted. They didn’t understand how I was allowed to do it without their input. They felt like I went behind their backs, even though they were aware of it the entire time. 

After Cavemen, I couldn’t get a job for a year-and-a-half. I had a great job in advertising, then I had nothing. I thought I’d ruined my life. I probably ruined my marriage. I wasn’t there for my daughter, all so I could make one of the worst things ever put on television. It really fucked me up. For two years, I wasn’t in a good place.

The Post-‘Cavemen’ Era

Lawson: Fortunately, I was able to write a spec and sneak back into television. Once I got back in, I realized Cavemen didn’t matter. I hadn’t been blackballed from Hollywood. No one cared. That’s the funny thing — I don’t think anyone was deeply scarred from it. It wasn’t a career-killer for anyone. Everyone’s done very well since then. 

Saji: I think I had it the worst after Cavemen ended. For more established writers, it was like a funny feather in their cap, but Cavemen was my first gig in the majors and I had to start over after the strike. It was like having nothing all over again. I can joke about it now, but that took a while.

Schiff: It took a little while for Bill and I to dig out from under it, but now we can laugh at it. A few years ago, Rolling Stone put out a list called “The 50 Worst Decisions in TV History,” I’m proud to tell you that I didn’t work on either of the first two. Also, I’ve been to the TCAs many times since, and I still have PTSD from that day back in 2007. 

Gardener: I’m still doing the cavemen commercials for Geico. I’ve been doing them the whole time. All the leftover caveman wigs and stuff from the show ended up being used in the commercials we’ve done in the years since. I look back at the show with affection for the experience and the people I worked with because everyone was great, even if the show was hard on everybody.

Martin: It was an impossible-to-produce show, and it’s made every show since seem easy. I carry a little bit of a torch for it, though.

English: I have nothing but love for Cavemen. It was a great entry into the TV world for me, and I have no regrets about it. Not everything is going to be a hit. 

Rosell: I’m glad to have worked on it now. It’s a real conversation piece to have the credit of Cavemen. It’s like being a person who survived the Titanic. But it was a massive misfire on many levels. It’s not a good show. When I see those new Geico caveman commercials, I can’t help but feel like we ruined the characters for Geico and that they’re stupid for going back to them. They should stick to the lizard.