CBS
Test Pilot is a semiregular feature sharing my first impressions of the pilots for next fall’s shows. These aren’t reviews, since these pilots can be rewritten, recast and retooled before airing, and the shows that eventually get on the air can prove much better or worse. But, premature opinions are why God invented the Internet, so let’s get on with…
The Show: $#*! My Dad Says, CBS
The Premise: CBS bought the rights to comedy writer Justin Halpern’s Twitter feed shitmydadsays, which repeated the bon mots of Halpern’s crabby 73-year-old dad, and is turning them into a domestic sitcom about a boomerang kid and his dad. When a young magazine writer loses his job (this is starting to hit a little close to home), he turns to his dad for a loan. In turn, Ed Goodson (William Shatner) is under pressure from his other son and daughter-in-law to move into a condo. Instead, they move in together, allowing for an unending stream of sarcastic one-liners from Ed. They’re the not-quite-original Odd Couple!
First Impressions: One of the great things about shitmydadsays, and creative writing on Twitter generally, is how it uses the restrictions of the form to create a word pointillistically, through implication. Dad bitches his son out about making kale for breakfast, say, and you can infer from that a whole set of attitudes and relations among them. The sitcom, by its nature, fills in all those implicit blank areas. Unfortunately, the pilot I’ve seen seems to have filled them in with outtakes from Too Close for Comfort and numerous other antique family sitcoms. Shatner is game enough in the role, but one-liners that seem funny on the page or screen—”Why do you keep giving me gifts? If I wanted a lot of piles of crap around the house, I’d have bought a bird”—are often forced coming out in the course of actual dialogue. And while CBS has kept the attention-getting Twitter title—except for cartoonifying the profanity—it introduces scenes to make the cranky Ed “relatable” by having characters say things to him like, “No matter how old your kids get, it’s never to late to be a dad.” I can only imagine what Halpern’s Twitter dad would say to that line.
Do I Want to Watch Another Episode? So far, I’d rather just skip to the good bits on Twitter.