Xander O’Connor and Travis Gilkeson had separate lives and rich personal histories before they were a creative team. Everything that had happened to them before they started working on writing and fully producing television pilots is irrelevant (except for their medical histories, degrees at Duke University and University of Tennessee respectively and needlessly thorough obituaries). Both men-children moved to Chicago to study comedy at the city’s various august institutions and met in their first class: level 1 writing at The Second City. It was love at first draft. Jokes! You see, what we did there was substitute the writing-related word “draft” into the common phrase “It was love at first sight.” Comedy gold. Feel free to use that.

Where were we: Travis and Xander continued their training in comedy writing at Second City and then at iO and, along the way, started writing sitcom pilots together (picture the two of them typing away on the same keyboard, fingers inching closer together as they are tempted to use words using the letters “G” and “H”, and eventually romantically touching in the middle a la “Lady and The Tramp.” Granted, that didn’t happen, but now you’ve pictured something fun!). They realized that it is hard to get entertainment industry professionals to read scripts and that they needed to do something to better stand out so began production on the first of (so far) five sitcom pilots.

They plan to continue writing and producing a mix of animated and live-action sitcoms until someone starts paying them to do it. Or, y’know, until the heat death of the universe. Whichever comes first.