Carpoolers
It would probably be sufficient to say that this show is just indescribably bad and leave it at that, but I don't think that would do justice to how awful this show truly is. With misframed shots all over the place, editing that seemed like it was done be a hyperactive child on meth, and comic timing that's pretty much nonexistent, it's safe to say that this show sucks on every conceivable level. The mere fact that this is given a half-hour of air time on national network television should make us all ashamed to be Americans (though, to be fair, it was actually created by a Canadian). It also illustrates a key flaw in the current trend of one-camera no-laugh-track sitcoms, which I inexplicably feel the need to expound upon. . . At one point in the history of TV, pretty much all shows were done live in front of a studio audience, so comedians like Milton Berle and George Burns had to be funny to get laughs from the audience and remind the viewers at home just how funny they were. Then when video tape came along and people realized it was cheaper and easier to just record the whole thing, networks added a laugh track to keep this sense of liveness (or at least queue the humorless viewers in on where the jokes are). Then jaded TV audiences got fed up with the fakeness of the whole thing (ironically The Simpsons was probably the watershed in this department) and demanded that sitcoms feel more like the shitty reality shows that were putting the nails in the coffin of the sitcom format. This resulted in many brilliant shows (that mostly went unwatched) and brings us to the current state of affairs. So even if none of them are actually funny (which is generally the case), a show like Two and a Half Men or King of Queens still has to have actual coherent jokes for the laugh track to punctuate. Carpoolers has none of these restrictions. The show opens with a bunch of middle-aged dudes singing Air Supply on their way to work and I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be funny, uncomfortable, or just sad. I'm still not sure that this is actually meant to be a comedy except for the fact that it's apparently created by Bruce McColloch, who at one point might have qualified as my favorite of the Kids in the Hall (and now ranks well below Mark McKinney). Oh, also, in case you're keeping score, Jerry O'Connell's role in this makes for the second awful show of the season to feature a veteran cast member of Kangaroo Jack.
Cavemen
It's a show based on a car insurance ad about neanderthals living in modern times that get treated like black people. On paper, this is possibly the worst show ever created (give or take the one about the family of animatronic dinosaurs, or the one with the family that lives with Sasquatch, or the one where we're supposed to take Charlie Sheen seriously as a comic actor). In practice it's a pretty mediocre sitcom about about a bunch of fratty post-collegiate dudes wearing 15 pounds of makeup and hanging out in San Diego. The central joke of the commercials about the cavemen being constantly discriminated against is just as tired and lame in the show, but the characters and dialog are certainly no worse than an average episode of Entourage. The execs at ABC were smart to program it next to Carpoolers, which makes it seem like Seinfeld by comparison, but just let this be a lesson to you that the next time you think an ad campaign is really clever and witty its probably best to keep it to yourself.
Pushing Daisies
Hey, do you remember that show Wonderfalls? . . . No? . . . How bout Dead Like Me? . . . No? . . . Well, this was apparently created by the same guy who wrote those shows, and for all the money that ABC has spent plastering the entire City of New York with these posters, it should be the fucking Citizen Kane of quirky dark-comedic network dramas. It's also directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, whose work as a cinematographer (Big, Raising Arizona, When Harry Met Sally) includes some of the most memorable films of the 1980s, but whose latter work as a director (RV, Big Trouble, Wild Wild West) might be best described as unforgivable. The show isn't bad, per se. It's just trying too hard, and I'm too fucking old for fairy tales and candy-colored dream worlds. It's the sort of show that'll probably get canceled after half a season and pretentious college girls will buy the DVD to throw it on their dormroom shelves in between their copies of Amelie and The Life Aquatic and when people notice it they can say, "Oh my god, that show was so amazing - I can't believe nobody watched it."
