Just when you thought they couldn’t think of anything wackier to put on TV, along comes word that the hit app Draw Something has had a pilot episode based on all its drawing goodness picked up.
If your guess was that it was a small deal with a two-bit broadcaster, think again. Not only were the rights to the pilot episode purchased by CBS, there was actually a bidding war between several broadcasters for those rights.
Draw Something has proven immensely successful, and quite addicting for the millions of players who draw something on it every day, though the popularity of the app has also fallen quite a bit in recent weeks. At its core it's a simple version of Pictionary, with one player drawing something, and the other having to guess what that drawing is.
While the show could've gone in one of several creative (though more risky) directions, it will instead take the safe approach, and simply have celebrities and players at home playing and competing with and against each other at the game.
Whether this format will prove entertaining enough to captivate a fickle TV audience for more than a few episodes is the big question. Even taking the celebrity angle into account, it's hard to imagine the show being filled with much in the way of excitement. But then, if viewers can be captivated by people doing nothing but picking random suitcase numbers and bartering with some shadowy dude in a booth in Deal or No Deal, there's hope for just about any concept to realize success.
Draw Something isn't actually the first mobile game to make the leap to the slightly larger screen; that OTHER ridiculously popular app, Angry Birds, already has an animated series consisting of 52 micro-episodes of just a few minutes each in the works for release later this year.
Draw Something (the TV show) will be jointly produced by Sony Pictures, Ryan Seacrest Productions, and Embassy Row, and will be featuring a well-known (though currently unknown) host.
