ABC’s ‘Cavemen’: Cro-Mags, Julie White, and Wild Neanderthal Sex

Vulture’s taking a look at some of the most prominent of the picked-up fall TV shows. Which are good? Which are horrible? And most important, which will be worth a precious DVR season pass?

Title: Cavemen

Stars: Nick Kroll, Bill English, Kaitlin Doubleday

Network: ABC, Tuesdays at 8

The pitch: Do you find the Geico Cavemen funny in 30-second installments? Well, then, it stands to reason that 22 minutes of the Geico Cavemen would be 44 times as funny!

Pilot report: Three cavemen live together as roommates in the suburban South: sarcastic Nick (Kroll); lunkheaded Jamie (Dash Mihok); and Joel (English), an everyman IKEA salesman. In the pilot, the three cavemen attend a country-club barbecue hosted by the father of Joel’s girlfriend, hot non-cavewoman Kate (Doubleday). Each of the three encounters the prejudices faced by cavemen in contemporary society: Jamie is seduced by a woman eager for a walk on the wild side, Nick sees racism (species-ism?) everywhere, and Joel just wants Kate’s father to look past their differences and accept him as a potential husband for his daughter.

Representative dialogue: “If you think you can blend right in with your snappy cocktail patter and your stylish hat, you are fooling yourself. I know these people. They’ve been oppressing our people for 750,000 years.�

Breakout star: Tony nominee Julie White (The Little Dog Laughed) plays Kate’s brittle, alcoholic mother with such comic verve that she seems airlifted in from another, better series.

Worth a season pass?: It’s not like anything else is on during this time period — at least not until American Idol returns — but we’re inclined to think that it won’t take long for the acerbic Nick to wear out his welcome … and for the racism metaphors to exhaust themselves.