Shit My Dad Says (the sitcom) Review

So I watched.  It was terrible.

They could have given us even better truth in advertizing and not bothered with last 75% of the title.  I know, that's an obvious and unoriginal joke, but you reap what you sow.

This afternoon I figured I'd see what reviews I could find on-line about the show.  I figured at least they'd be amusing.  Not so.  I could only find one review - linked to a million times.  (I'm not bothering linking to it again here, just do a search, you'll find it.)  So I figured I'd help fill that void.

The Twitter account was (frankly) more hype than hilarity.  The book is almost certainly going to remain unfinished and returned to the friend I borrowed it from.  And the show... well I've made my opinion clear and I severely doubt that this will be a case of me being in the minority. 

Casting Shatner seemed like a good move, and he delivers... as much as he can with such a tepid script.  The MadTV alumni oversell their parts and utterly fail to find any reality behind their choices - which is no way to do comedy.  And the "My" of the title is so completely humdrum and uninteresting that you have to wonder how bad the guy they fired was.

I almost laughed at one joke - not even a particularly good one, but at 20 minutes into the show I was getting desperate.  Shatner comments on "My" doing an impersonation of him.  Yeah.  Fucking brilliant.  I couldn't muster enough breath to actually make a fully voiced guffaw.  I guess I'd expended my full appetite to "meta" earlier on in the evening watching Dexter being calmly greeted by an all too obsequious funeral director.

I predict this one won't be on the air after (Canadian) Thanksgiving.

I Never Thought I'd Tag an Entry with both 'Hitler' and 'Sitcom'

A sitcom about a happily married Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun in a typical 'Pleasantville'-esque American 50's suburbia... except apparently it's England. Though only Neville Chamberlain speaks with a British accent.

"Heil, Honey, I'm Home!"

(and the 2nd half, if you are truly so inclined)

No. Really.

Not a joke. I mean that in every way. It wasn't funny. I don't even mean that it was too taseless to be funny. It really isn't funny. It was cancelled after one episode. It was a real (attempt at a) sitcom, when it might have been funny as a one-time-only SNL sketch.

Apparently, (and this may be retrodicting) it was intended to be a parody of bad-sitcoms. The thing abour parodying something bad is that you can't afford to be bad yourself.

Whoever created this series should be forced to sit and watch it, Clockwork Orange-style until they promise to never do it again.

Little Mosque Scant Humour

Oh, poo.

I had high hopes for Little Mosque on the Prairie, CBC's apparently highly contentional new sitcom about, well, a little mosque on the prairie. When I first saw a preview for it on Christmas Eve - with a group of Muslims feverishly playing a shot in curling I laughed really hard.

I thought: Oh, wow. Here is CBC really putting itself out. This could be a real new dawn for Canadian programming.

Well, so much for that.

The show has no edge. Most of the humour is based on weak word-play, and what else there is is built upon the hackneyed notion that Muslims are all seen as terrorists. While I expect that the current worldwide obsession with terrorism was inevitable, it was dealt with in the most unimaginative and, frankly, gut-less of ways. A Muslim talking on the phone in an airport, using the words 'suicide' and 'bomb' in the most innocent ways justifiable is immediately detained. Wahoo! Barrel of laughs. A gag weakened even further, when a Muslim contractor's slogan - "We'll blow the competition away" - is taken out of context in the same fashion. Yawners.

To be fair, I did laugh out loud twice. Though I have since forgotten the jokes - yes, the jokes that stand out in memory are the ones that did so by being bad.

And the acting was at best, un-even. Some of the cast take a naturalistic approach - which seems to behoove the material better than the broad strokes of the majority.

It seems to me that this is a sad opportunity lost.

Remember the first season of 'The Newsroom?' There was a show with bite. 'Little Mosque...' could have taken a page from that show and been a truly socially relevant show with a voice that spoke to issues that remain sharp to the moment, rather than softballing at the dull side of the blade (eww - bad mixed metaphor). That doesn't mean that begin goofy is out - heck, curling Muslims was what captured my attention in the first place. But that's just it! I've never even thought that Muslims in Saskatchewan would fall in line with the rest of the community and do the only thing available to while away the winter months, while the humour exhibited in the pilot episode was tepid at best.

Here is my hope. 'Little Mosque...' recieves plenty of criticism along the lines of what I've just outlined, but also reaches a regular and devoted audience of Muslims who are pleased as punch that they're being represented on TV as something other than bad-guys on '24.' (Irony for those who watch both shows and get the inerent in joke in that sentence.) And hopefully a good number of those same devoted Muslim viewers agree that 'Little Mosque...' could serve itself, the audience, CBC and (God/Allah forbid.) Canada better by having a more socially caustic voice.

I'll keep watching for now. Perhaps the pilot wasn't representative of where the show went in full production. I'll definitely last until I get to see the curling Muslims again. It's a short season, so I might even make it all the way just out of combined respect for a good idea and encouragement to take it to the next level.