ABC's Selfie: You Can't Do the Internet on Television

Selfie, an ABC sitcom that’s a contemporary riff on My Fair Lady, substitutes a twentysomething pharmaceutical sales rep named Eliza Dooley for Eliza Doolittle and a marketing whiz co-worker, Henry Higgs, for Professor Higgins. But the actual update is digital. Within the first three minutes of the pilot, Eliza reveals herself as “Internet-famous”—the target of online praise and derision. A phone to her nose at all times, she’s a caricature of online obsessives, a beast raised in captivity with Wi-Fi.

The sitcom—which the network airs in a prime Tuesday 8 p.m. spot—revolves, as many formulaic comedies do, around the reformation of its protagonist. Eliza, like Doolittle, must become a “lady,” and hashtags are her cockney accent. She realizes this in the first episode, after flaming out on a plane and watching the footage go viral. With no friends to console her, Eliza reevaluates in voice-over: “When Siri is the only person who is there for you, it kind of makes you realize being friended is not the same thing as having friends.”