Unhitched: Mardi Gras Croc Attack
By fred | March 24, 2008
(S01E04) We have been having to face with a lot of new sitcoms this season, a lot of very awful and unfunny ones at that. Turns out that making people laugh for about 20 minutes isn’t is easy a task as it looks. And with this new show, as I said yesterday before watching this week’s episodes, I said that - unlike others - this show was actually funny, maybe not always but it had its moments, and it had potential.
I said that before, and now that I’ve seen this new episode suddenly I’m not so sure anymore. It’s not that this episode was particularly bad or anything, it’s more that it wasn’t really good…
I used to think and say this show had potential to grow into something that could be really funny, but the problem with this show is that after watching this episode I could say about exactly the same : a few things are funny, others simply don’t work, but it could grow and evolve into something good. Problem is, we’re four episodes in already, and nothing has changed, at all.
Episode after episode this show did not seem to evolve, not even to try to change, evolve, improve, only to do the same over and over again. It keeps repeating itself, and doing the same mistakes week after week, and it makes me thinks that while it could have potential, apparently no one seems willing to do anything with it, they just waste it, not doing anything with it.
It still has its moments, for instance this time I thought the opening scene was pretty funny indeed. After watching it I thought I was in for a good episode, but I was so wrong, because I had seen what was the best and funniest moment of the half-hour. The whole naked-co-worker bit with Kate simply didn’t work, Tommy usually can be involved in some good/funny bits, but this time he was coupled with Sahgal so it was all doomed to fail, and the whole Million Dollar Baby thing wasn’t any good either.
And really, why do all new sitcoms these days have to be so predictable. Of course he was going to be beaten up by a girl, and not address this directly but complain to the coach, who would let it out loudly in front of everyone… You could see everything coming, and none of it was funny.
Same goes with characters, and while it’s a standard rule in sitcoms that there should really be any evolution, characters should not see their situation changed because it would break what makes things work, and despite the fact that in the past sitcoms have proven that it was possible to go against that rule, we all know that you can’t forget this rule’s twin : there is a need for a permanent possibility of evolution.
Maybe your characters cannot actually get married, have a child and move away, there still is the need that such a thing could happen, they still need to have the possibility to go there, even though it will never actually happen. Unhitched doesn’t even do that : basically every episode has each of the characters finding a new date, going out and one way or another it’s an enormous failure. So much that not even once when they go out with someone, you actually think there’s a possibility for this to go anywhere.
You know the longest this can possibly last is the current half-hour of the episode, you know it will fail, and you just wonder how and why it will not work. Sure, maybe it could be funny - that is if jokes actually were funny - but that also means there won’t be character development, we won’t care for those people, it’s just one fart joke after the other. And I have nothing against fart-jokes per-se, but here they’re just not funny.
I still haven’t watch the other episode yet, I’ll do that right after posting this, but it seems that this show doesn’t try to improve, will waste its potential and just fade away, because if it never improves there’s no real point to keep watching week after week. If the show was getting better it would be nice, and it could eventually end up being a great half-hour filled with laughter the entire time.
But tuning in for only one or two laughs tops per episode, I’m not sure it’s worth it, no.
