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Dads

2013 in Review: The Worst New Shows of 2013

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2013 was not exactly what we’d call a banner year for the broadcast networks. While buzz continued to center around cable and the ascension of Netflix to a legitimate player in the TV industry, the big four and CW tried desperately to find some comfort food in the form of tepid comedies and stories about serial killers. The end result was a miserable year for the new sitcom and a lot of shows that felt like exact clones of each other showing up. On that note, here’s the worst new shows of 2013.

 

Dishonorable Mention: LA Shrinks (Bravo), Blood and Oil (Discovery), Scrubbing In (MTV)

 

I tried to avoid lumping reality into this list, but these shows each left horrendous tastes in my mouth for different reasons. For Shrinks and Scrubbing In it was the reduction of legitimate medical professionals to glorified sex objects, while for Blood and Oil the combination of ridiculous plotlines and a purely unlikeable central figure in what was intended to be a David and Goliath story completely turned me off. Still, I grade reality on a different curve and to compare this to the dreck in scripted programming is apples and oranges, hence merely a dishonorable mention.

 

5 – Welcome to the Family (NBC)

 

This could have easily been any number of other lousy generic family comedies that NBC was praying would beam into more houses than their critically acclaimed shows, but the tie goes to the one that lasted a meager three episodes before getting yanked for whatever NBC decides to put in the 8:30 slot in a given week to patch the rest of the fall. While the initial concept wasn’t too awful (teen gets knocked up and the two families are forced to come closer together), the combination of unfortunate implications and generally uninspired execution killed this show deader than Welcome to the Family killed my ability to laugh for a half hour.

 

4 – Do No Harm (NBC)

 

Get used to seeing the peacock’s name on this list because we’re not done with Bob Greenblatt’s numerous missteps this year. Do No Harm was an incredibly weak mid-season offering that tried to bring the Jekyll and Hyde drama into a modern setting. However, since Hyde wasn’t that well differentiated from our Jekyll half (or Grey’s Anatomy for that matter) the end result was a boring product that got sent to the Saturday night death slot after two episodes. Even the series ending twist that the more villainous side was our central character’s true nature felt forced and it’s for the best this show saw a quick mercy killing.

 

3 – Cult (CW)

 

Cult gets away with being slightly lower on the list than our next two entries on the basis that it almost enters “so bad it’s good” territory. The weakest of our serial killer crop, Cult relied on wooden acting, a ludicrous script, and an obsession with overly dark camera work that kept the viewer from seeing everything. Sadly, the truly worst conceit the show tried to pull was the notion that a CW show would generate the sort of the viewership and fan obsession that would make directioners look sane, measured, and understated by comparison.

 

2 – Dads (FOX)

How is this show still on the air? Moreover, how on earth did Fox give it a back-order? This show is dreck on every conceivable level. The writing is sloppy and borders on every-ist in the book. This is made even worse by the sloppy execution of the script and the soulless mugging (reminiscent of a bad Jim Carrey impression) of Giovanni Ribisi and Seth Green. What truly makes Dads getting a full 22 inexplicable, however, is the fact that it’s literally dragging down the rest of the FOX comedy block (which is actually pretty good, and in terms of quality might be the strongest of the big four– rivaled only by ABC) in the ratings, meaning that whatever leverage Seth McFarlane has over FOX executives could easily sink Brooklyn Nine-Nine and The Mindy Project as well.

 

1 – Ready For Love (NBC)

 

At the top of this article I mentioned that I tried to lay off the reality genre as much as possible for this article (based on the amount of reality I watched I could easily have made an all reality all-worst). However, Ready For Love tried so desperately to cross three or four different genres of shows, so I’m breaking my own rule for the purposes of this list.

As bad as NBC has been developing comedies this year (they were 0 for 7 last year, and I anticipate another 0 for 3 in the fall), they’ve been equally awful in developing event shows. Million Dollar Quiz, as much as the game show junkie in me enjoyed, slowly devolved into a fiasco, with power outages, bad weather, and bad math (they had to juice the pot by about $300,000 in order to come through on their advertising). However, MDQ had nothing on Ready For Love, which wanted so desperately to mash-up The Bachelor and The Voice. Ready For Love was boring, cliched, a slog (there was definitely not two hours of material for that premiere) and worst of all, for a show about love, it showed precisely zero heart. An unmitigated disaster all around, and not even in a way that you could redeem the show as being cheeky about it’s lousiness, Ready For Love was really the worst new show of 2013.

Next Time: Next Monday we look at the best new shows of the year, as networks scramble to reclaim former glory and cable tries to hold the fort against massive losses in the upcoming year.

Dads Might Be the Worst New Show of the Season

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Source:Fox
Source:Fox

Dads: Tuesdays at 8 p.m. On FOX

Normally, when I look at a show, I open with a little context about the TV landscape it’s coming into. I do this normally to give not only a little context, but to highlight trends in new TV so you know what’s competing for the eyeballs and attention of a given market segment (there’s a lot of TV out there and precious little time after all. While this show is one of many comedies built this year around adults and their parents cohabiting as the end result of a stagnant economy, (and I’ll discuss this more next week when I look at CBS’s Mom) I think the best place to start any discussion of Fox’s new sitcom Dads is with the negative buzz that has surrounded this show.

Simply put, many of the critics who have seen advance screenings of Dads have found the show to be complete and utter dreck, both unfunny and morally reprehensible (particularly in matters of race, but I defy you to find a Seth McFarlane show that believes in holding back). Fox in turn, has started an ad campaign telling America to ignore these fine people who get paid to watch TV and to watch their controversial new show. Needless to say, for the purposes of this one show, with as much vigor as I try to answer the question “Should I watch this show?”, I’m also going to try to answer “Did this show deserve the heat it got from critics in screenings?” (By the way, I feel like some marketing guy at Fox is going to completely take that last question out of context).

That being said, Dads follows the lives of two best friends: Warner, played by Giovani Ribisi and Eli , played by the hardest working man in McFarland: Seth Green. Their lives are simple and straight forward until their dads, played by Martin Mull and Peter Reigert unexpectedly move in. From there, hilarious hijinks ensue as generations clash under one roof!

So, is it as bad as those who got to screen this at the TCA’s claim it is? In one word: Yes, just yes. Dads is the sort of tired, hacky, TV that takes the worst elements of every sitcom you’ve ever seen and churned them into a blender of pure unfunny the likes of which I’ve never seen. Warner and Eli’s dynamic is ripped straight from The Odd Couple without any of the heart. The jokes, are hacky, cliché, and stretched past the point of any credibility, and delivered with excessive mugging and an almost playground bully-esque cadence (seriously, try plugging in “Smooth Moves, Ex-Lax into any line delivered by any lead in the show, and you’ll probably laugh harder). Making matters worse is the omnipresent laugh track that laughs at every. single. line. The end result is the sort of show that looks and feels like a sketch from Tim and Eric Awesome Show, down to the very cringing you’ll be doing while watching it.

As for the racism and sexism, it’s not nearly as atrocious as people hype it up to be, but the fact that they went for the most base, lowbrow, and least innovative way to address the topic is revolting. Worse yet, any potential irony or opportunity to leverage the joke as a function of someone’s ignorance is erased by the (even more moronic) laugh track. With no seeming hypocrisy, subtlety, or even something as simple as a generational divide (a golden example in using the mechanism of turning the joke back on the oppressor is Pierce Hawthorne) the race jokes feel empty and more like cheap shots than they probably would anywhere else, particularly when it is established immediately that our younger leads are no more enlightened than their fathers on the topic. The end result are jokes that are more like **ha ha, [insert group here]**, which is the sort of sensibility that leads to this sort of sociological criticism of Dads, even if the jokes themselves seem way too dumb and unfunny to actually do real damage.

The Final Verdict: Dads is the sort of show that seems like it would show up inside another show as a parody of a cliché, trite show. It definitely takes a sloppy hand with the racial humor and sexist humor, but it’s not nearly as morally reprehensible or mean spirited as it was initially perceived– just mind numbingly ignorant. Skip at all costs, this show is the sort of soul crushing utter garbage that should it ever get a fan base, they will be about as reviled as Juggalos.

Next Time: This Sunday is the Emmy Awards! I’ll be here on Manhattan providing live coverage!