Mike Upchurch has elevated slacking to an art form.
The Emmy Award-winning writer is the creator of "Powerloafing," an online comedy about a world-class slacker, Cubicle Carl, whose adroit avoidance of work makes him a role model for aspiring office slugs.
"That's part of the definition of powerloafing," Upchurch said. "You're not just goofing off, you're getting away with it and you're convincing all the right people that you're a top worker."
Upchurch creates what he calls the world's smallest sitcom on what may be the world's smallest set -- his Los Feliz district apartment.
Everywhere are props for his comedic endeavor: Carl's cubicle, folded and stored on the porch; a singing fish modified to deliver dialogue via remote control; a mummified corpse in a shirt and tie.
A corpse? The disturbingly realistic prop is the centerpiece of Upchurch's latest sketch, "Department of Doom," in which actor Neil Patrick Harris (of "Doogie Howser" and "How I Met Your Mother") plays a malevolent, Canadian-accented co-worker who joins Cubicle Carl on a morbid misadventure. Think comedic horror, a la "Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein."
Upchurch developed "Powerloafing" before the last season of "The Chris Rock Show," which won an Emmy Award in 2000 for outstanding writing for a variety/music show. But he's not one to rest on his laurels; the gold statue sits on a bookshelf near the front door, covered by a baseball cap.
"I might be a little superstitious about displaying the Emmy," he explains. "I'm proud of it, but I'd feel weird building a display case with a rotating disk and spotlights or something. I hope to be in a position to win another Emmy someday, but if I had one up there spinning I might change my mind because two spinning Emmys would be stupid."
Upchurch pitched the "Powerloafing" idea in 2000 to Pop.com, a high-profile Internet entertainment venture bankrolled by billionaire Paul Allen, whose partners included two of Hollywood's hottest film companies -- Ron Howard's Imagine Entertainment and DreamWorks, which brought director Steven Spielberg into the venture.
He figured the pedigree ensured the start-up a better shot at surviving than, say, the Digital Entertainment Network, which by that time had already imploded. Even if the sight of people playing foosball in the middle of Pop.com's Glendale warehouse in the middle of the day was a bit disquieting.
