S#*! My Dad Says

Channel: Nine
Day & time: Monday, 8 p.m.

Well, what a disaster. Never has the first word of a sitcom’s title more aptly summed it up. There was cause for optimism when this show was announced – the show is based off a genuinely funny Twitter account in which a 29 year-old literally tweets the ‘sh*t’ his politically incorrect and profane dad says. Furthermore, the show is on CBS in the United States; home to the hugely successful The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother. Unfortunately, the show has little of the comic originality common to both its parent Twitter feed or its companions at CBS.

Jonathan Sadowski plays Henry, a writer who loses his job and seeks out his father to borrow money. Henry’s dad is the cranky, insult shouting and misanthropic Ed (William Shatner) and he’s less than pleased about being asked for money – prompting obligatory exchanges between the two about disappointment and failure to live up to expectations. Rounding out the cast is Henry’s successful half-brother Vince (Will Sasso) and his highly-strung wife Bonnie (Nicole Sullivan). While it seems like there could be enough going on between these characters to generate some laughs, they are unfortunately generally irritating rather than interesting.

Aside from money, what Henry really wants is a connection with his father. After a run-in with an employee at the DMV, Ed realises he too wants a connection with his son and offers Henry a room in his house – in what is intended to be a true “aww” moment. Unfortunately all it does it set up a done-to-death premise for a series.

Thus, the show is essentially about the odd couple living together. It seems like it could be a tried and tested method for generating laughs, but after watching S#*! My Dad Says it becomes clear that we’ve seen it all before. How could a show developed from a Twitter feed, one of the most hip and new-age mediums, be so dated and unoriginal?

Essentially though, S#*! My Dad Says suffers from one fatal flaw - it’s just not very funny. What we see is just a grumpy old man raging at the world. No one is safe from his diatribes: girl scouts are likened to “beggars with merit badges” and a raccoon is “windmilled” into a shed so he can “think about what he’s done”. Disturbingly, one joke even generated images of a large man squealing and weeping while having sex, while another featured Henry and Ed dancing together with Ed singing a song he used to sing to Henry’s mother.

Luckily though, the show uses a screeching laugh track to help you identify what’s supposed to be funny. One can only assume that a laugh track was chosen over a live studio audience in order to avoid awkward silences.

It’s hard to find anything to like about S#*! My Dad Says. The jokes are more cringe worthy than funny (and in some cases even disturbing), the characters’ flaws and personalities are generally irritating rather than interesting and the story is unoriginal rather than innovative.

Transferring tweets of 140 characters into a sitcom was always going to be a challenge. It’s the lack of context and obscenity that makes the original Twitter feed genuinely funny – trying to expand tweets into a 22-minute script and toning it down for a pre-watershed timeslot just doesn’t work.

Fortunately, Ed isn’t your real dad – so you don’t have to listen to the S#*! he says.

Mat Kelly