LOLWUT? “I Can Has Cheezburger” can has its own TV show

This Wednesday evening, once electoral politics have settled down, those who adore lovable kittehz on the Interwebz will finally have a Bravo-made reality TV show to watch. (OK, you can actually watch the pilot right now on Hulu.)

LOLwork documents the lives of Cheezburger, the Seattle geek team that capitalized on the LOLcats meme.

The pilot episode opens with a discussion of whether a cat that looks like it’s dead can be used on the site—short answer: no. Cut to a morning meeting evaluating a few photos, and commentary from the site’s users that there isn't enough variety among cat breeds on the site, including hairless cats.

That, in turn, prompted this from Will Sharick, a content manager at the site: “The less hair a cat has, the more likely you are to see its genitals.” (That was the only line in the show that made me laugh, nay, guffaw!)

The conference (which lasts about a minute or two) yields a “surprise team-building” meeting with a video production competition for the site (perhaps contrived for the Bravo show). In a few short minutes through some tight editing and time-lapsed photography, the Cheezburger team, paired up with co-workers that seem to not actually like each other, is transformed into all kinds of human drama.

Ben Huh, the company’s CEO and founder, comes across as smart, but semi-detached for the entire episode: there is more than one brief background shot of him working on his treadmill standing desk.

The New York Times summarized the show as having a “depressed, workaday vibe,” but still declared it to be “superior” to Bravo's  other tech-reality show: “Start-Ups: Silicon Valley.” (That debuts Monday night.) GeekWire panned the premiere: “I just don’t see LOLWork having the chops to translate into TV-speak for a bitchy Bravo audience.”

How would I summarize the pilot of LOLWork? I’m not really a fan of reality TV to begin with, so I was skeptical to start. The first episode wasn't enough to really make me—even as someone who already has a passing familiarity with LOLspeak—want to keep watching.