$#*! I Saw On TV Last Night

While I was anxiously awaiting the season premiere of Fringe last night, N. happened to notice "$#*! My Dad Says" in the TV guide that hovered before our eyes.

What better way to kill a half an hour, which would otherwise seem like an eternity as I counted the nanoseconds between 8:30 and 9:00? When the fate of Olivia Dunham, trapped in a a bizarro universe, facing such threats as brainwashing, a partner she doesn't have in her own universe, who will probably become a super-villian like Darkman because of a time travel accident that left his face horribly mutated, and her mother who is dead in her own world? How will she survive? Will she become bizarro Olivia???

Anyway, so I watched "Bleep My Dad Says," as they called it on TV last night.

I knew right then, before the show even started, that things weren't going well.

They said bleep.

They didn't even say "shiz" or "stuff" or, really, anything other than "bleep" which just sounds so...

Lame.

The premise is pretty simple. Kid in his mid-20's loses his job and has to move in with Dad. Dad's an old curmudgeon and doesn't make this easy. Though it sounds mind-bogglingly one dimensional, it is. Not that many a fine show wasn't based on a stupid premise. Take "Seinfeld," for example. Sadly, this is no "Seinfeld."

William Shatner didn't come close to saving it. I love him to death. He brings charm, wit and flair to almost everything he touches.

There were a couple laughs. Shatner successfully delivers a few of the watered-down raunchy truisms of the sort we have loved from the twitter feed that started it all. But watered down they were.

The edgiest things got was when the son (whose name I can't even remember) was taking too long to clean up the kitchen, and dad says, "How can you still be cleaning? We just had dinner, we didn't accidentally kill a hooker." That was kind of funny.

Compare that to this scene from Family Guy, more than a decade ago. Stewie is sitting on an actual hooker's lap and says, "Tell me the truth. Is there any tread left at all, or is it like throwing a hot dog down a hallway?"

Now that is disgusting, shocking, and hilarious. And technically not in violation of Federal broadcast laws.

The only hope for this show is that it becomes a new Married with Children. If you have one-dimensional characters, boring stories, and no obvious direction to go that hasn't been well traveled by Three's Company, then you can still make it work by walking right up to the FCC line, bending over, and farting onto the other side.

There's a place for raunchy humor in our TV culture.

There's no place for raunchy humor with a G-rated filter.

This show has to get nasty or get lost.