This is the age of inside baseball. The voyeurism of lonelygirl15 (inside teens), the unfettered insight through SNL Backstage (inside television), the metacognitive conceit of Nobody's Watching and Goodnight, Burbank (inside the making of television), the deconstructionism of SNLOCmeme (inside television drama). We've become so accustomed to the stories we tell ourselves that we tell ourselves stories about those stories. Old hat? Feels new. Especially now that the Hollywood creation myth has been metastasized into YouTube.

So now Clark and Michael, a new Web-only mockumentary series from CBS that takes us inside the Hollywood script pitching process. Arrested Development fans, rejoice! The series includes appearances by Tony Hale, not to mention Andy Richter ("Late Night with Conan O'Brien"), Jonah Hill ("Accepted"), David Cross ("Arrested Development"), Patton Oswalt ("King of Queens"), John Francis Daley ("Waiting") and Joe Lo Truglio ("Reno 911!: Miami").

It's good. And long. First episode clocks in at ten minutes or so. But definitely worth watching as Clark and Michael -- having paid for a camera crew to record the process of their inevitable success -- flounder fecklessly. They just don't. Get. It.

But here's a funny thing: The show is a mockumentary, but it could easily be real. Not hard to imagine young YouTubers out there, recording their every waking moment, believing in the success of their story before believing in their actual success. How joyously recursive!

And it reminds me of that old philosopher's joke, the turtle problem, in which a little old lady derides a professor's astronomy lesson: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise."

The professor asks what, then, is the tortoise standing on?

The old woman says "you're clever son, very clever. But it's turtles all the way down!"

Not turtles, granny. Video cameras.