Dads is bad. Dads is painfully, totally, in spots off-the-charts bad, made with the kind of primitive humor and style that makes you wonder whether anyone involved had ever seen a sitcom before. It’s the only multi-camera, laugh-track sitcom of the lot here, but that’s not what makes it regressive. It regresses to a time long before the advent of multi-camera sitcoms.
Dads’ premise is simple enough: two guys (Seth Green and Giovanni Ribisi) work together designing videogames. They have a hot, young Asian secretary who does everything they want her to do, including dress up in Sailor Moon outfits. One day, their dads decide to move in to their apartments (because of the economy or something; I swear the telling is so clunky and awful that I can barely recall the set-up).
I teach a unit of my class on media ethics, wherein the students are required to determine what the demographic (age, race, gender, etc) and psychographic (attitudes, worldview, political leanings, etc) for a given television show is. Sometimes that’s tough. In the case of Dads, it’s easier to tell who the show’s written for than it is to remember any of the characters’ names. I mean, they design videogames for a living? They can’t work unless they’re stoned? Their secretary has no work to do—seriously, none—aside from walk in and throw in a few punch lines? How much pandering does a show have to do before it just turns into one giant circle jerk?
Unsurprisingly, the dads are un-PC and deliberately offensive. Very surprisingly, someone actually convinced Martin Mull and Peter Riegert to play the dads. It’s depressing to have to watch them deliver dusty old lines that would make Archie Bunker roll his eyes at the lameness of. “I was going to eat a piece of chocolate,” says Riegert, “but then I remembered it’s for women!” Ha ha? “The Chinese are an honorable and noble people,” says Mull, “but you can’t trust them!”
I mean come on. It’s not even like the show is actually offensive in any way—it came under fire recently for its handling of Asian stereotypes, but I just assume that’s because Seth McFarlane is involved, and everyone likes to wring hands about Seth McFarlane. Truly offensive humor might even make it fun for the shock. It’s simply lame, the kind of sitcom that we’re (hopefully) almost done with; at least it’s hard to imagine members of the current generation, reportedly the most tolerant generation the world has yet known, playing curmudgeonly racists in forty years, but who knows?
About Ted McLoof
Ted McLoof is a writer at Rookerville and teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Gertrude, Monkeybicycle, Sonora Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, The Associative Press, and elsewhere.He's recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. He is very cool and very handsome and he'd like to buy you a drink.