The best part of a year after it aired in the USA, the comedy series “S#*! My Dad Says” was aired on the UK channel 5* last night. A channel formerly known as Fiver but now pretentiously written and pronounced Five Star – nothing to do with the 80′s pop group of the same name. This new sitcom is based on a Twitter account that I came across a couple of years ago and was basically a son repeating, as the title suggests, what his dad says. Officially referred to as “Bleep My Dad Says” to satisfy the US authorities and anti-profanity campaigners, the show deals with a father, his son and the satellite characters of another son and his wife.
In the pilot episode we discover how a son who had moved out of the family home years before has gone back to living with his dad. The mother is not dead, but divorced and so will doubtlessly turn up at some point.
That last sentence might seem a bit cynical but that’s how the programme comes across. The rawness of the original twitter feed has been tempered. The bad language that in the context of quotes was hilarious has been dismissed with and only the remnants are left in the title. The script seems very generic and could be applied to any number of shows. Aside from Shatner’s, the characters (or at least the performances) seem bland and uninteresting. It’s a by-the-numbers show, the laughter seems canned aside from a few glimmers provided by Shatner, there doesn’t seem to be the dark original humour suggested by the original Tweets. It’s obviously written by committee, which isn’t always a bad thing, The Simpsons is written by one person then a group adds stuff in for the final script, but this show seems like they used “Sitcom writing for Dummies” and refuse to deviate from it because “that’s what the book says right here – stubborn man must always refuse to admit he’s wrong but make up with his son because it’s what he really wants to do”.
Admittedly I’ve only seen the pilot episode, so we’ll see how it goes, but from this evidence the show would have worked much better as a late night programme, leaving in the swearing and humour of the source material. The supporting cast should be made up of distinctive characters in their own right and not just there to make Shatner stand head and shoulders above the rest. In Boston Legal the cast were brilliant and Shatner still shone, so it can be done.
Overall I found the programme, or at least that episode, very disappointing. The reviews on Metacritic gave it a very low 28% rating and I guess that’s why it’s hidden most of the way down the Sky EPG on Five Star. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg_s6aOp23M )
This doesn’t count as cake of the month as it’s merely a new flavour of a previous winner. But as with the Daim edition, it’s now available in Tesco as well as Ikea.
