If 2014 is the year of the selfie — with Ellen DeGeneres’ much-retweeted Oscar photo and the popular song “Selfie” by The Chainsmokers — a TV show about the social media phenomenon was inevitable.
ABC’s new comedy “Selfie,” premiering Tuesday at 8 p.m., stars Karen Gillan as the social-media-obsessed Eliza Dooley, who has 263,000 online followers — but no real friends.
Though Gillan is popular on Twitter (564,000 followers, a popularity built from her two seasons on “Doctor Who”), it’s the only social media site the 26-year-old Scottish actress is on — unlike her “instafamous” character.
“I do take selfies sometimes, but I’m not a comfortable selfie-taker,” Gillan told The Post while seated at the lobby bar in the Beverly Hilton. “I feel awkward when taking a selfie and I don’t know where to put my facial features so I just go for this startled expression because it’s my comfort zone.”
On “Selfie,” Eliza — a pharmaceutical sales rep — enlists her older co-worker, marketing guru Henry (John Cho), to help re-brand her reputation after a workplace mishap goes viral. The connection to “My Fair Lady” — in which Eliza Doolittle takes speech lessons from professor Henry Higgins — is deliberate, though creator Emily Kapnek (“Suburgatory”) simply started out wanting to tell a story about the role of technology in modern relationships, not update a classic.
Future plotlines will follow Henry’s efforts to get Eliza off her phone and to connect with people in the real world — as well as his own attempts to become less of a workaholic and more sociable. The transformation will be a slow one that could play out over multiple seasons.
“It’s really the story of an addict and the addiction just happens to be with social media,” Gillan says. “So with any addict story there are lapses — two steps forward and one step back.”
To pick up the voice and mannerisms of her valley-girl character, the Inverness-born actress watched American TV shows like “Girls” and hung out at SoulCycle in LA. Her red hair still cropped short after shaving it for this past summer’s “Guardians of the Galaxy,” she also wears a wig made of her own hair — a present from Marvel after playing the blue-skinned assassin Nebula.
Eliza is a far cry from the Doctor’s companion Amy Pond on “Doctor Who,” the role that made her career. But Gillan — who moved to LA a year-and-a-half ago — hopes fans of the BBC sci-fi series will follow her to “Selfie,” her first major American TV show.
Her fanboy cred (she’s still a regular on the Comic-Con circuit) and acting chops should help in the challenge of making the audience root for a self-involved character. “At the start, I think it’s very natural to judge Eliza and in some ways share Henry’s attitude and be a bit sort of repelled by what she represents and the work she needs to do,” Kapnek said at a July press conference in LA.
“But Karen did such an amazing job, I think, of growing empathy very early on.”