From tweets to a sitcom

The only difference,perhaps,is that the actor playing the title dad,William Shatner,will be reading lines supposedly uttered by Sam Halpern,74,a retired doctor,and posted online by his son Justin,29,who started the Twitter page in August at the insistence of a friend. More than 1.3 million people subscribe to the page,which inspired a book and now this show.

Thanks to his dads rude witticisms,Justin Halpern is now a best-selling author and a co-creator of a network sitcom. If someone had asked him,a year ago,to name his dream job,he said,I would have said,writing on a TV show that I created. In an interview hours after he learned the show had been picked up by the network,Halpern said,This is crazy. He said he received an e-mail message from his father,thinking it would be about the series pickup,but instead it was about an overdue bill.

Justin Halperns story sounds like every aspiring tweeters dream come true. A fledgling screenwriter,he had sold only one feature-length script,which was essentially dead on arrival at the studio. After splitting up with a girlfriend,he moved home to San Diego from Los Angeles a year ago,saving money by bunking with his parents. He was still a senior writer at Maxim magazines website,maxim.com.

A comedian at heart,he started writing down the quips of his father. A friend suggested Halpern start posting them online. It was just for fun,Halpern says,insisting that all his fathers utterances are genuine. The Twitter feed quickly snowballed into something more,partly because of the actor Rob Corddry,who tweeted about it. By early September,Halpern had literary agents trying to sign him to write a book. By November,he had an agreement with Warner Brothers and CBS. Halpern and his writing partner,Patrick Schumacker,were paired with the creators of Will amp; Grace to write a pilot episode,which was taped in March and received high marks from the studio and the network.

Most of the 119 tweets that Halpern has published so far are not repeatable in print or on CBS,but one from November conveys the general tone. Oh please,you practically invented lazy, the dad is quoted as saying. People should have to call you and ask for the rights to lazy before they use it.

The pilot episode includes four or five lines from the Twitter feed,although in slightly more family-friendly form. The series,Halpern said,will be about the dichotomy of this older guy who says whatever he wants,and this younger guy whos tiptoeing through life, careful not to offend for fear of losing jobs or friends.

A few other Web properties have sprouted TV shows in recent years. The CollegeHumor website,collegehumor.com,produced a season for MTV,and The Onions online unit is developing shows for IFC and Comedy Central.

Halpern no longer lives with his parents. Hes back together with his girlfriend. But he returns home a couple of times a week. The truth,he said,is that he likes the stuff,both vulgar and not,that his dad says.