By now, if you’ve read my stuff, I’m something of an optimist. I figure you can go to other areas of the internet (read: “pretty much all of it“) for scorn, stupidity, horrible spelling, and sub-human levels of pig-headed rants that usually compare Hitler and rape to things like sandwiches and a person’s opinion on the weather. So I like to talk about stuff I’m jazzed about. Or have some hope for something great. Or that might have a surprise or two up its sleeve.
Not today, though.
No, today I was cruising the internetz, and fell upon a thing that shocked me. I’ve never seen it before, but who knows how many times it might have happened. But it stopped me dead in my tracks.
Dads got a 0% on rottentomatoes.com.
Dads is a Seth MacFarlane produced live action show on Fox. It stars Giovanni Ribisi, and Seth Green, who I usually look forward to seeing in any media. Was I waiting on the edge of my seat for the premier of this show? No, heck I didn’t even know the show was already airing, and doing poorly, until Agent Denise’s excellent write-up about it.
What came next was a stream of various critics and sources of critique that AS ONE VOICE united to warn us that this was a crappy show. And I mean Everybody. Everybody and their mom. It was impressive the amount of “No” Dads received. But I didn’t sit down and check this show out till the 0% it got. Because that is impressive. Out of literally thousands of movies, only 101 or so movies have ever gotten 0%. And as for how many TV shows, I still haven’t found that information, but I’d guess the number out of hundreds of shows that got 0% would be pretty low.
So I watched the first episode of Dads…
Meh.
No, that’s not quite right. “Meh” is too calm. MEH. Yeah, that’s better. MEH to this show. What actually gets me angry about how unbelievably mediocre Dads is to watch, its because of the pedigree. The actors deserve so much better. The directors deserve so much better. So do the camera operators, the set designers, the script supervisors, the production assistants and so on and so on. This entire show feels like MacFarlane owed somebody a favor. And that favor was paid back in the form of a really awful show.
Lame, nearly comatose jokes trudge forth from the actors’ lips, only to stumble and lay awkwardly dead on your TV. And the actors are trying, but when the writing is this bad… how much effort can you put forth?
To the writers of Dads: “NO.” Sudden bursts of racism, cruelty, and ineptitude from the characters does not equal “edginess.” It equals crap. Stop crapping in my TV. I actually don’t like anybody on this show, by the way. Not a one. Everybody is just plain un-friggin’-likable. Gah!
Seth Green has written way more hilarious jokes in the first half of a 15-minute episode of Robot Chicken, so I can’t help but think he might be going a little crazy having to memorize these anemic scripts. Seriously, if they let Seth Green just improvise all his lines, Dads would be 1000% funnier.
But they don’t. And in that, they have at least earned the 0% they have.
*****
Check in next Thursday as I go down the list of my least favorite things in movies, TV, comic books, and etc. Hey, I only give into my negativity like once a year, so here it goes!