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HERE ARE A LOT of
bad new comedies arriving this fall, and
the thought of writing separate reviews for Dads, We
Are Men, Super Fun Night, Welcome to the Family, Sean Saves
the World, The Millers and The
Goldbergs made me not want to
get out of bed in the morning.
So I’m going to provide short
and sweet reasons why you
should avoid them. Standard caveat: Some of these shows could
improve. It’s about as likely that
a unicorn will fly out of NBC’s
headquarters and sprinkle every TV viewer in America with
joy-creating pixie dust ... but you
never know, I guess these things
could happen.
And here’s a bit of context for
what follows. I appreciate that
pilots have to do an intimidating
number of things. They have to
introduce characters, set up the
show’s premise, outline the relationships between the people on
screen and — oh yeah — entertain
the audience as well. If it’s a comedy, some laughs would be nice.
That’s a lot of territory to
cover. But there’s one more thing
that every pilot has to do, in
many subtle and obvious ways:
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Tell us what its priorities are.
Is it going to go for belly laughs?
Is it more interested in creating
a mood or a feeling? Is it content
to just hang out with the characters, or is the show more about
the plot and the suspense? There
are hundreds of different goals a
program can pursue, but the pilot
has to clue us in on a few of the
priorities it cares about most. The
priorities established in the pilot
Some of these shows
could improve. It’s about
as likely that a unicorn
will fly out of NBC’s
headquarters and sprinkle
every TV viewer in America
with joy-creating pixie dust.”
don’t have to remain static for the
life of a program — and they really
shouldn’t — but initial episodes
need to tell the audience what
matters to the creators.
For example, the priorities that
the first two episodes of Fox’s
Dads communicated to me could
be summarized in this way: “We
are capable of coming up with the
odd, reasonably decent joke now
and then, but we are quite satis-