Bleep My Dad Says

The most high-tech sitcom of the season lands with a conventional thud.

William Shatner makes the pilot barely watchable, but only because the fleeting moments of heart overshadow the mostly limp one-liners. In a business obsessed with younger demos, the septuagenarian Shatner is an unlikely sitcom star, but he provides the lone spark in this otherwise-formulaic comedy.

I do have a problem with the way $#*! My Dad Says is so blandly traditional, so predictably brash, and so lazy.

It's not unwatchable--CBS being the last broadcast network that enforces a certain level of competence and coherence in its shows--but it's irrelevant, a wholly generic sitcom so divorced from its source material that you have to pinch yourself to remember it had anything to do with the Internet, or with the world after 1985.

Sadowski, recast in the role of Henry, has better delivery and chemistry with Shatner. And the show may well please fans of throwback insult comedies, longing for the days of The Ropers and C.P.O. Sharkey. But why anyone needed to buy the rights to a Twitter feed to base a sitcom on the concept "Cranky Old Man Makes Wisecracks" is beyond me.

Though based on a Twitter feed, it's far more of an old-fashioned sitcom than Tina Fey's weekly 22 minutes of whimsy, and Shatner is occasionally quite funny as a curmudgeonly retired doctor whose relationship with his son (Jonathan Sadowski) never quite developed.

The plot of the $#*! premiere episode marks an improvement on the first pilot as it scraps an uncomfortable real estate scheme story in favor of better establishing the relationship between Henry and Ed, but the show's humor is still too often as crude as its title.

Not a single thing William Shatner's Dad has said in those ubiquitous CBS ads has been even remotely funny, a trend that continues in tonight's premiere.

What makes Justin's dad funny is the brevity. Without it, $#*! My Dad Says is not.

The attempt to shoehorn the Shat into the strained story of a father and an adult son, Henry, getting to know each other for the first time seems false. And when there are glimmers that it might work, Shatner's character, Ed, is visited by his grating other son, Vince, and his even more grating wife, Bonnie. They're awful.

Oddly, at 79, Shatner comes across as too energetic and youthful even for the 72-year-old he's playing. The bigger problem is that he's given nothing to do or say worth the doing or saying. He gets better mileage from a Priceline commercial.

The new version, with Jonathan Sadowski as Shatner's estranged son seeking to establish a relationship, feels less like a Twitter feed and more like an actual television show--but not a good television show.

There was one laugh-out-loud moment in the premiere and that was when son Henry imitated his father and William Shatner's character remarked that no one can do a good impression of him. Otherwise it was a lot of furrowed-brow staring at the TV when the laugh track roared, wondering what the #*!! they were laughing at.

The show displays all the sophistication you might expect from a social media that limits its statements to 140 characters. Here's a tweet from me: This show is a piece of (bleep).

Obviously, beware of salty language, but also beware of joke setups that belong in a vaudeville act. The corny tone begins and ends with Shatner; he's supposed to be playing a curmudgeon, but he just comes off as a ham.

Face it, $#*! My Dad Says was a bad idea from inception to pilot.

CBS prounouces $#*! as "bleep," although the Twitter account that inspired the show uses an actual profanity. Either works as a short critique. [4 Oct 2010, p.38]

As awful as $#*! My Dad Says is, you almost detect an ember of promise here. Maybe it's Shatner--whom we will always love, no matter what--or maybe it's an illusion. But CBS needs to blow some life into that ember before it's too late. Maybe it already is.

If it's any solace to the handful of organizations that are boycotting this new William Shatner sitcom over its attention-getting title, the title is the least of the reasons not to bother watching. A better one is that it's not very good. In the process, $#*! My Dad Says wastes the talents of Shatner.

So they can't use the name, can't use most of the jokes and can't keep the tone of the Twitter feed. Remind me again why CBS wanted to make this into a TV show?

A loser it is. Shatner's quips in real life are better and more outrageous than anything Halpern's father or Halpern himself (who exec-produces this bomb) ever came up with. Hearing Shatner deliver them just points that out.

It's kind of like Dad says: "If it looks like manure and smells like manure, it's either Wolf Blitzer or it's manure." $#*! My Dad Says is no Wolf Blitzer.

There isn't a shred of fun in this tale of a curmudgeonly grandpa and his unappealing adult children. Its only redeeming quality could prove to be that it persuades clueless executives, desperate to "monetize" social-network technology, never to try to marry TV and Twitter again.

Let's put it this way: $#*! makes ABC's ill-fated appropriation of the Geico cavemen in 2007 look like sheer genius.