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[est]

because holy hell, it looks terrible.

[David_Dovey]

No I don't think we have.

Alright cool that's settled. Lock please

[Inlander]

"Looks"?

[est]

It is upsetting, because apparently the book is actually surprisingly good.  I got it for a friend and he reported back nothing but good things, so I was hoping that the TV show would surprise me.  But what I have seen of it so far from youtube clips has been half-assed, like they are only really going through the motions of making a TV show.  There are some moments when the feel of the twitter quotes version of the dad comes through, but mostly it's just William Shatner, who I know a lot of people venerate, but he plays pretty much the same character in every fucking show now, and his attitude doesn't seem to be right for the role.

[SarahBeth]

My family likes to watch it, so I thought perhaps it might be okay. BUT IT'S NOT!!! For me it is actually painful to watch. I just leave the room now. It's like the actors....I don't know, they're just saying things and thinking "Okay, this is going to be funny" and nothing else. Painful.

[JD]

It feels like a rehash of Everybody Loves Raymond except Frank is the main character.

[Liz]

The problem is that most of the things on the twitter page can't be said on television, so it really loses a lot in translation. I think I watched the first four or five episodes, hoping it would get better, but it was just... eh. If it were on cable and they could include everything from the twitter it could be the greatest show.

[Kugai]

Is that weird

Or what?

[KvP]

Just to put things in perspective: This is obliterating 30 Rock, which it shares a timeslot with, in the ratings. It's a good thing NBC has nothing better to do than renew 30R because otherwise that would be bad news.

[David_Dovey]

Just to put things in perspective: This is obliterating 30 Rock, which it shares a timeslot with, in the ratings. It's a good thing NBC has nothing better to do than renew 30R because otherwise that would be bad news.

Hey America, fuck you, you don't deserve Tina Fey anyway, jerks.

[SarahBeth]

I'm in America, and I really like Tina Fey. She's freaking hilarious. Don't take her away!

[Alex C]

I dislike 30 Rock more than a little. Word play jokes don't go over my head, they just kinda bore me if they start getting in the way of the pacing. By contrast, I liked Mean Girls, but I felt like the jokes had more time to breathe in a movie format. 30 Rock's sheer density often takes the pleasure out of it for me.


Anyway, yeah, Shit My Dad Says is terrible and I don't understand how anyone can enjoy Shatner in that role. The Denny Crane role worked out OK for him because it was a side role and while the character was certainly ridiculous, a lot of that ridiculousness was a put on even the in context of the show. What little SMDS stuff I've read before, however, only hits me funny if the guy saying that stuff had more sincerity than bluster. It's kinda funny to think there's a guy out there who just genuinely thinks and raises his kids that way, particularly since the SMDS tweets read like if some pessimistic but decent advice was filtered through Lyle from Achewood. From what I've seen on the show, however, Shatner comes across more like he's openly fucking with his son's head, which is considerably less funny and a lot more douchey.

[Alex C]

Double checked those SMDS tweets and it looks like that guy was more dickish than I remembered. Whatever. Still a horrible idea for network TV.

[ALoveSupreme]

"Looks"?

From this article, I realized I am actually glad Twitter exists solely for the purpose of contextualizing every bad sitcom ever:

"Instead, the series has figured out a way to treat each and every one of its characters like a Twitter feed, full of pithy bites of information that suggest there's very little below the surface and jokes that strain for something beyond labored, obvious punchlines."

This is literally roughly 95% of sitcoms in the history of any network.