Guys With Kids "Pilot" Review

Has a show ever been canceled before its official premiere? If not, Guys With Kids seems likely to make history as the first series to be canceled before its official premiere in two weeks.

Guys With Kids isn't the worst sitcom ever produced, but it's very forgettable, and as funny as a herd of elephant’s drinking water. NBC wants to try out a more traditional sitcom co-created by one its darlings, Jimmy Fallon; however, the series is a bit too traditional. ABC Family launched Baby Daddy during the summer. Both shows are similar, except the characters on Guys With Kids are older. I doubt NBC wants to be in the same ballpark as the tween/teen-driven ABC Family network.

Is Guys With Kids funny? No, it is not. Scary Movie 2 used six or seven screenwriters to churn out an unfunny script. If I researched other unfunny comedies, I'd find more than one writing credit. Comedies and sitcoms are like that old phrase 'it takes a village to raise a child.' Guys With Kids takes three creators, a writing staff, and talented actors to tell an unfunny story about raising children in the 21st century. It does take a village to raise the children in Guys With Kids. The men, all best friends, live in the same apartment complex, go places with their offspring, and deal with women stuff; all while rearing their children. I admit to laughing during Anthony Anderson's few scenes of misery, most notably during the Wii scene when he and his friend, Nick, played a dancing game.

There isn't one unpredictable beat in the "Pilot." The token control freak bitch of the show, Sheila, mentions she has a date with former NBA star Kareem Abdul-Jabar, so of course he'll show up by episode's end. Jesse Bradford's character, an emasculated father-figure with no back-bone, caves whenever his ex-wife bullies him about how to raise their child, so of course he'll find backbone and tell his ex-wife that he'll raise his child without her input because he's trustworthy. Nick and Jamie Lynn Sigler are spouses with two young children. Like Anthony Anderson and Tempest Bledsoe, they're beyond stressed, overworked and tired from raising their children 24/7. Jamie-Lynn uses a school event to set up a date night, but her husband is the stereotypical dumb male who can barely dress himself let alone remember an important night his wife has been looking forward to. And so of course he learns what went wrong between them, and, of course, he corrects his mistake by turning their living room into a high school production of Titanic.

Guys With Kids is as safe as all the baby-proof stuff the fathers have in their respective apartments. Jimmy Fallon even states that the series is filmed in front of a live studio audience. The live studio audience sounds an awful lot like canned audience laughter put in by the post team. Laugh tracks are the safest device used in Hollywood. The show runner is able to pick and choose the volume of laughter if a joke actually falls flat. Audiences are supposed to lean on these kinds of devices in television. Musical cues are meant to control an audience's feelings during a particular sad or joyful moment. The thinking behind laugh tracks is the same as in a group. Say you're out with friends or in a work-setting, and someone cracks a joke that sucks, but mostly everybody present laughs; their laughter is infectious and you'll involuntarily laugh, too. I imagine the writers hope the audience involuntarily laughs which then fools them into thinking the show is funny, and thus, they'll come back week after week.

I didn't laugh because of a clever joke. No, I laughed when Anthony Anderson yelled or gesticulated wildly. Anthony Anderson's physical comedy skills were the lone laughs of the night. The writing is absolutely atrocious. I wonder if the actors, when they return to their trailers, drop their heads and sigh heavily, like Joaquin Phoenix did during the interview with David Letterman. The characters are archetypes. Sometimes, sitcoms flesh out their characters, but I'm not hopeful. Each character is designed by a single trait, whether it's being a single dad, or a stay-at-home father, or a controlling bitch, or a wife who wants the romance back, or a working woman who, uh, works, or a frat boy who's still attached to his frat days and who brings that mentality to parenting.

There's nothing new to see in this show. The parenting-is-hell angle has been used enough in the last three years. The series 'premieres' in two weeks on NBC, which means the second episode will air. I won't be watching.

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