The War With Quality

Because I'm a lowly little blogger (and a test blogger at that), the broadcast and cable networks have not seen fit to send me advance tapes of their new shows. So I have to see them at the same time as everyone else, which can be a good or bad thing. Good because I experience shows at the same time as everybody else -- nothing like a water cooler conversation when no one knows what you're talking about -- and bad because I can't warn people when they're about to waste thirty or sixty minutes of their lives on a bad show.

This was one of those "bad" instances. I just sat through the premiere of The War At Home, a sitcom airing on FOX right after The Simpsons. The show's about youngish dad Dave (Michael Rapaport) who doesn't want to deal with the demands of having teen and pre-teen kids. I could tell you the rest of the premise, but it's not worth our time. Suffice to say, the show attempts to be a combination of Married... With Children, Titus, and, weirdly enough, Family Guy but it's missing one ingredient that all three shows had: funny lines. The writers try to be outrageous -- the daughter pretends to date a black guy, the older son might be a cross-dresser, the dad's having a fit about all of it -- but they don't pair it up with any character depth or, saving that, cutting insults. Maybe if this aired in 1987, the tired situations and lines -- "Why aren't you at the mall with your friends, you know, buying makeup and stealing stuff?" Dave asks his teenaged "technical virgin" daughter, Hillary in the line that was oft-repeated in the promos for the show -- might have worked better. But they just seem to be outrageous for outrageousness' sake.

Oh, and one little note: I know it's been four years, but couldn't Fox have moved the show back a week so it didn't premiere on 9/11? The show has the word "war" in the title, for crissakes!