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.
