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is so bad it hurts
Please, a quick, timely death to end viewers' pain
By Elizabeth White
Calling ABC’s "Bob Patterson" this year’s "Michael Richards Show" gives too much credit to "Bob Patterson."
At least "Michael Richards" didn’t seem like a show that should’ve bombed the season before.
But the jokes on "Bob Patterson" are so stale that they could have been lifted from any failed sitcom of the past two years.
There are jokes about "The Matrix," Monica Lewinsky, the slang phrase "mac daddy," John Tesh and Pat Sajak. Topics too old for Jay Leno and David Letterman to mine comedy from are apparently still okay for a "Seinfeld" alum’s project.
To be fair, some of these jokes are designed to show how uncool Bob Patterson is–John Tesh as a guest star leaps to mind–but their aggregate just shows how lame "Bob Patterson" is.
A Lewinsky joke? Nobody even forwards that stuff on email any more.
The laugh track seems to be the cruelest joke of all, offering canned guffaws when the audience is most likely wincing.
While the cast members don’t have much material to work with, they don’t do much to help themselves either. Most of the supporting characters are one-dimensional, one-trick ponies, and the cast desperately mugs for the camera in an effort to somehow make their lines funny.
Bob Patterson’s wife (Jennifer Aspen) is a shrill, New-Age mystic who waves her hands around a lot.
His business partner is a single-minded friend whose punch line is to ignore everything not related to money or sex, and his secretary, a wheelchair-bound klutz supposedly satirizing political correctness, just knocks things over and runs into chairs when she doesn’t have anything better to do. Which is often.
Jason Alexander is the best of the group, showing that a sitcom about a short, balding motivational speaker and starring a former "Seinfeld" star wasn’t such a bad idea on paper. His character is similar to the one he played on "Seinfeld," but more confident and successful, which gives Alexander a larger emotional range to explore.
But "Bob Patterson" is such a bomb that he shouldn’t be anything more than depressed, especially considering that Alexander is also an executive producer for the show.
Perhaps ABC knew all of this when it scheduled "Bob Patterson" against "Frasier." The NBC stalwart should so utterly demolish "Bob Patterson" that there will be no lingering death for this rookie, as there was for "Michael Richards."
October 2, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Elizabeth White is a staff writer for Media Life.
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