![]() ![]() “We don’t want the show to be the racial insult comedy show,” said Scully. Perhaps realizing their leading man had overreached, Sulkin joked, “I think having Brenda in that (schoolgirl) costume is our anti-Vietnam stance.” “I’ve had the weirdest conversations with people about what they feel is racist.” “I think that we’ve become a really careful culture,” Green said. Then Green attempted to set the bar far higher than “Dads” – at least the version suggested by the pilot – can clear by comparing the show’s more controversial moments to “All in the Family” or “The Jeffersons,” and the way those landmark ’70s sitcoms tackled race relations, the war in Vietnam, and other hot-button topics. Burns says something racist, or Krusty dusts off an old routine full of outdated racial stereotypes, it makes sense because of context “If Marge said it, it would be wrong.” Scully noted the evolving nature of good and bad taste, and how Homer Simpson strangling Bart was once controversial and “is now considered just a lovable act of child abuse,” and noted that context is everything. If we missed the mark a few times in the pilot, I think we’re aiming to hit it better.” We ideally want to keep it insulting and irreverent, but the most important thing is that it’s funny. Everyone on the stage knew what was coming, and they had answers at the ready.Įarly on, for instance, Sulkin acknowledged, “In the pilot, we all noticed some things that we’d like to change or tweak moving forward. This wasn’t like the “2 Broke Girls” fiasco from a few tours back, where creator Michael Patrick King was completely unprepared for, and defiant about, questions about ethnic stereotyping. The panelists knew what kind of room they were walking into, though. So by the time the “Dads” cast and creative team (which included comedy veteran Mike Scully, who once ran “The Simpsons” and has worked on “Everybody Loves Raymond,” “Parks and Recreation” and other hits) arrived late in the day, we had a pilot that many in the room found offensive, as well as one even the head of the network only partly defended. And number 2, you should take it to task, and we”ll talk about that in January.” “If this show still (has) low hanging-fruit jokes that seem in bad taste and haven”t been earned with intelligence,” Reilly said, “and the characters have not become full blown over the course of the next summer months – number 1, the show”s not going to work. (That is, indeed, a show many critics hated at the start but have come to like, but it wasn’t one being dinged for racism back in 2007.) And then FOX president Kevin Reilly stoked the flames in his executive session by saying, “Do I think all the jokes right now are in calibration in the pilot? I don”t.” He also begged the TCA’s patience on the matter, reading excerpts of scathing reviews for “The Big Bang Theory” pilot. It is, for those jokes and so many others, pretty universally the least popular fall pilot among the TCA. Among other gags, it has Mull dubbing a boxing video game “Punch the Puerto Rican,” has Riegert offended by being mistaken for the Eric Stoltz character in “Mask,” and has Green and Ribisi convincing an employee played by Brenda Song to dress up like a giggling anime schoolgirl to impress a group of Asian investors. ![]() The live-action comedy from Seth MacFarlane and fellow “Family Guy” writers Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild stars Seth Green and Giovanni Ribisi as best friends and business partners whose estranged fathers (Peter Riegert and Martin Mull) breeze into town and offend everyone with their old-school attitudes. Under any circumstances, the press tour panel for FOX’s “Dads” was going to be an awkward affair.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |