Dads is Fox's latest attempt to have a hit sitcom and it's not only failing, it's dragging the whole night down. Tuesdays were supposed to be the place to be for Fox this fall. The Mindy Project is critically praised, Andy Samberg's hotness would keep the audiences tuned in while Brooklyn Nine-Nine found its audience and Fox made its peace with the fact that New Girl's best days ratings wise were it's first weeks on air.
Fox saw this as the night to counter program and to do so hard.
The night's biggest ratings went to CBS with their embarrassing geriatric shows like NCIS And Dads seemed the perfect show to put some dents into that franchise. As inept retirees, Peter Riegert and Martin Mull are in Mark Harmon's age group, underscoring how ridiculous it is that the squat, 62-year-old plays a man of action.
But to get that point across, it would need an audience.
Everything about Dads seems to have been thought up to run viewers off. This is most obvious in the casting of the two leads: Seth Green and Giovanni Ribisi as Eli and Warner.
The time sucks behind this awful show are Wellesley Wild and Alec Sulkin who seem to think its the 80s and they're doing Revenge of the Nerds.
The two are that out of touch, so out of touch that they destroyed their show before the first episode aired.
Dads was never going to be big with Seth Green in the cast. Most people, after all, don't feel the need for garden gnomes and, those who do tend to put them on their front lawns, not in front of their TVs. Seth Gteeen is repulsive and that's before you bring in the character of Eli. But as a friend of Warner played by Tommy Dewey, it might have worked. Dewey was coming off a multi-episode stint on The Mindy Project where he played Josh, Mindy's boyfriend a stripper promised to grind the pretty out of.
Giovanni Ribisi? He appeared to be coming off a police line up -- for pedophilia.
There is no pretty to grind out of Ribisi. For much of his 38 years, Ribisi has attempted to become a star and the universe has repeatedly and loudly responded: Hell no!
The closest he's ever come to fame would be appearing on a few episodes of Friends as Frank Jr. -- Phoebe's creepy brother. You may remember Phoebe carried the baby for Frank and his girlfriend who used to be his teacher. The girlfriend was played by Debra Jo Rupp. In the aftermath of creating the role, Rupp parlayed her moment of heat into a lead role as Kitty on That 70s Show while Ribisi found that brief moment on Friends was his entire career.
17 years after he created the bit part that passes for fame in his sad career, Ribisi was selected to replace Tommy Dewey. This was said to have been a 'tweek' in response to the taping of the first album. It wasn't.
It was a response to Seth Green's jealousy. The gnome insisted he was not playing opposite Dewey. He'd been whining to the producers -- who include Seth MacFarlane -- that Dewey didn't have the chops, that Dewey wasn't a team player, etc. Green then intentionally tanked the interaction with Dewey in the filming of the pilot. Seth pointed to laughs he got in scenes with others and the non-laughs with Dewey as proof that Dewey had to go. With that, the only non-grotesque male in the cast was replaced with Ribisi who looks like after birth on a good day.
He's also not funny. How much that can be pinned on him, who knows?
The scripts are awful and they can't overcome the 80s pretense that physically disgusting men like Ribisi and Green can not only attract gorgeous women but can do so while endorsing and/or practicing workplace harassment.
With Dewey in the cast, it might have worked because pretty can get away with a lot.
That's why, for example, Kate Jenkinson can get away with so much as the vile Kendall on ABC's Super Fun Night. If you're not getting it, ask yourself who you're more likely to forgive for stealing your parking space: Sophia Vergara's Gloria or Wayne Knight's Newman?
In a piece of absurdity, Vanessa Lachey plays Ribisi's wife on the show. In real life, Vanessa married Nick Lachey, a man who's made People magazine's most beautiful list. But we're supposed to believe she'd be attracted to pedophilish Ribisi, a man who has a fit when her character leaves the home to do a community play? These are the storylines that pre-date The Dick Van Dyke Show, by the way.
And then there's poor Brenda Song as Veronica. There are so few roles on TV for women of Asian descent that Song has to play scene after scene where she's the target of racist 'jokes.' Hopefully, she'll have a career to return to when this show gets the axe.
All Ribisi will have to return to is Scientology. And the end is coming. Last week, the alleged sitcom posted an all time low in the ratings. Already a critical disgrace, Dads really can't afford low ratings.
They can take comfort in the fact that they're not the only ones getting bad ratings.
For example, Gallup notes:
GALLUP DAILY
Nov 14-16, 2013 – Updates daily at 1 p.m. ET; reflects one-day change
The Drone Warrior's been flying low for some time now. Americans are outraged over his secret and illegal spying and the con game that is ObamaCare (he promised universal health care but created a law that just forced Americans to buy insurance) was already shaky but then came the lie.
It was a lie many in the press worked overtime to minimize.
"If you like your plan, you can keep your plan." That was one of the many lies he told. In fact, Dan Amira (New York magazine) posted a video of all the times Barack offered what has since been exposed as a lie.
Again, many worked overtime to minimize what took place.
Take Bob Somerby who can't stop his caterwauling about Glenn Kessler's fact checks and whining that he should be fact checking the lies of Fox News. Who's he to talk? Has he once fact checked Barack on "if you like your plan, you can keep your plan"?
Of course not.
They're all playing the Jill Stein game these days.
Remember her?
Brenda Bad Ass?
Gonna show us all how a real campaign for president was run, gonna hold the corporatist Democratic Party accountable in the same way she did the Republicans?
Then came the first debate and Barack tanked.
Stein never managed to hold him accountable or call him out again.
Brenda Bad Ass was, in fact, a fake and a coward.
Most of all, she was a fraud.
In the wake of Barack's disastorous first performance, any real left candidate would have used that moment to say, "I'm the fighter, I'm the one who'll stand up for you, come on over to my side!"
But Jill Stein was a fraud so, when Barack tanked, her campaign became all about going after Mitt Romney.
Last week, the fraud showed up on Bill Moyers soon to end public television show. Our favorite response was posted by Roland: "I would love to vote Green, if only I could take them seriously. Jill and Margret remind me of high school girls planning a prom. And Jill's assertion than human civilization may not last more than forty years was delivered with such coy sweetness that Borderline Personality Disorder cannot be excluded."
She's such a fraud.
She spoke about attempting to enter the presidential debates in 2012 and being handcuffed and taken elsewhere by agents, held for nine hours, but never worrying "because because Democracy NOW! had caught us on camera."
Democracy Now!, the whore and piss report.
Jill has a faux group these days, The Shadow Cabinet. They do things like issue a plan for veterans, days after Veterans Day to ensure that they receive no press attention.
They've been silent on the Iraq Inquiry Digest, just like Democracy Now!
The question people need to be asking right now is why Amy Goodman, with an hour of Democracy Now! each week day, has been unable to even do a headline on this?
Her audience would learn a great deal more if she would stop whoring for the White House. When Barack's out of office, don't be surprised that Amy Goodman tries to act like she was there all along, holding the administration accountable. No, she wasn't. She was throwing inaugural balls, she was auctioning tickets to them. She was whoring. That's all she is today and her show is lukewarm on a good day. She sold the Libyan War, she's is an embarrassment to Pacifica Radio and she should stop receiving millions of dollars for her bad program that Pacifica doesn't even own the rights to after paying millions for it.
Last week, major news attracted press outside the US. Al-Arabiya News explained:
The United States is behind the delaying a key report's release showing how the UK went to war with Iraq, London-based daily The Independent reported on Wednesday.
White House and State Department officials are behind the blocking of the four-year Chilcot inquiry, which the UK's Cabinet Office has been criticized for halting.
The newspaper saw drafts of the report earlier this year which challenged the official story of the UK's entry into the Iraq war, mainly related to exchanges with then-PM Tony Blair and former president George W. Bush.
Sarah Lazare (Mint Press News) observed that "the U.S. government is forbidding the release of communications between Blair and Bush in the lead-up to the war, declaring it classified information and pressuring British Prime Minister David Cameron to wipe this information from the report." Asia Tribune reported, "Although the British Cabinet Office has been under fire by the public for stalling the progress of the four-year Iraq Inquiry by Sir John Chilcot, senior diplomatic sources in the US and White House indicated that it is officials in the White House and the US Department of State who have refused to sanction any declassification of highly critical pre- and post-war communications between George Bush and Tony Blair." And Robert Fox (The Week) argued:
The refusal to disclose presidential correspondence and conversations is yet another example of US exceptionalism, a principle often cited by President Obama.
Today 'exceptional' means not being accountable - not having to explain to your allies why you want them to make war, not having to justify extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib or chaotic secretive military courts.
The Chilcot Inquiry has, by many accounts, already unearthed glaring evidence of government mismanagement and worse. Chilcot should steal himself and publish all he knows, whatever Britain's exceptional allies might think and say. It is a duty he owes the public
In addition to the above, you could read Richard Norton-Taylor (Guardian), or listen to The Voice of Russia, check out Iran's Press TV.or Russia Today.
But US outlets?
Forget it.
That includes Amy Goodman's fake 'war and peace report.' Democracy Now! had plenty of time to waste on nonsense last week but no time to cover serious issues like the above.
"Only with you!" Amy Goodman likes to shout in her never-ending efforts to line her pockets with your money during pledge drives.
But Goodman never delivers.
She whored for the Libyan War, she whores for Barack.
If his approval rating had been 60% or greater, she might have covered his efforts to suppress the facts about the Iraq War.
But he was at 41% so she ignored the revelations.
She's not a journalist. A journalist asks, "Is this news?" A journalist doesn't concern herself with, "Can Barack's popularity afford it if I report this?"
More and more people are catching on. It's why Dads is dropping in the ratings, it's why Barack's in trouble with the polling, most of all it's why Amy Goodman's reputation is in tatters. People catch on. And when they do, there's no turning back.