This week, TBS rolls out two new family sitcoms that follow the same conceit of the only-slightly dysfunctional nuclear family that bends the norm while having to learn to work together as a family, etc etc. It’s a concept that shouldn’t be unfamiliar to anybody who has ever owned a television set.
Neither are particularly original, but attempt two different approaches with varying degrees of success. Are We There Yet? Is a traditional three-camera sitcom with a middle-class clueless dad, a pretty face for a mom, and two bratty kids. Neighbors from Hell is animated, but has the same set-up. Well, except that the family members are all demons from hell.
As anyone with a memory for utterly forgettable movies should remember, Are We There Yet? is based on the 2005 Ice Cube road trip movie about a sports store owner guy taking his would-be girlfriend's kids to Canada. The series follows the movie while vaguely discounting the even more forgettable sequel Are We Done Yet? It has nothing to do with the movie’s premise, of course, as it’s just a typical sitcom, but at least the characters stay the same. Sort of.
They’re all played by different people; with ex-football player, Old Spice shill and all around funny guy Terry Crews in the role of Nick Persons, previously played by Ice Cube. Rather than a sports store owner, he is now a well-to-do IT consultant. Not that it matters what his job is, since he seems to just lounge around the house all day every day, goofing around with the kids or bickering—and often losing, for comedic purposes—with the wife. There are a few other of these little changes; instead of talking to a bobblehead of Satchel Paige who talks back (with Tracy Morgan's voice), Nick now talks to a bobblehead of Charles Barkley, who doesn't talk back. You can draw up your own conclusions as to why they made the change.
One (unintentionally) hilarious detail that allows them to circumvent continuity is how they insert one scene of the parents telling the kids to call Nick “Dad” and the kids just easily agree to this, allowing the rest of the series to bypass the whole stepchildren adjustment and proceed as a regular sitcom family.
Having seen three episodes of this thing, I wondered what the hook of the show is supposed to be. As it is, it seems to hinge entirely on the very likable Terry Crews being a funny dad archetype, which only goes so far with the shoddy material he has to work with. Other than that, it’s indistinguishable from all the rest. The first episode, which aired last night, concerns Nick and his wife fighting over the fact that she would rather hyphenate their last names than taking his. The following episode, which airs next Wednesday, is about the son preferring soccer over American football. The third, airing June 23rd, revolves around the daughter trying to buy a JCrew sweater worn by Michelle Obama. The banality of it isn’t even enough to register vitriol—it’s just numbing. These are barely quibbles, let alone the family-fracturing conflicts the show depicts them as.
So far, the only highlight is Ice Cube’s recurring guest role as Nick’s antagonistic brother-in-law, who claims to be part of a one-man black ops unit. Aside from continually threatening to murder Nick without a trace, he has the Batman-esque recurring gag of exiting while no one’s looking. The absurdity of this character is precisely what’s amusing about him, affording us a break from the boring whining of this otherwise nondescript family.
But “nondescript” isn’t how you can call the Hellmans family in Neighbors from Hell. With their green skin and a magical goblin-demon-thing functioning as a dog, they’re sent by Satan himself to live on Earth to carry out a mission: sabotage the completion of a giant drill that could bore a hole right into the center of Earth, where Hell supposedly is.
Neighbors from Hell is much more successful in being entertaining; perhaps because animation offers more creative leeway, perhaps because at its helm is Pam Brady (who has made a reputable name for herself as a writer on South Park), or perhaps because of the funny folks behind the voices. As the human-sympathizing, television-loving, doofus dad Balthazor is Mad TV's Will Sasso; Molly Shannon plays his irritable hard-drinking wife Tina; and Patton Oswalt is their "dog" Pazuzu, who in Family Guy vein is the smartest, sanest one in the family.
In the pilot, Satan pulls some strings so that Balthazor is made VP of the company sanctioning the drill in order to stop them. There he meets his crazy boss Kilbride (That 70's Show's Kurtwood Smith) and the brains behind the drill, a sad Turkish immigrant named Chevdet, voiced by another South Park writer and sometime voice actor, Kyle McCulloch. Meanwhile, Tina meets the Hellmans' new neighbors: one's a gratingly nosy lady and the other's a pill-popping hag. Get it? They're the real neighbors from hell!
Really, though, despite the old joke the premise is based on (hell dwellers appalled by modern Americans), there is promise in it. While not exactly riotously funny yet, the premise at least shows some promise, and the cast is nothing to smirk at. It's just that Pam Brady's writing hits the mark more potently the more absurd and profane she gets (see Hot Rod, Hamlet 2, South Park), and Neighbors from Hell, for all its fire and brimstones, doesn't really raise enough hell. At least not in the pilot. At least it bothered to have its first episode set up an ongoing premise, though, as opposed to just expecting viewers to accept a status quo like so many new animated series often do.
What's apparent now is that TBS is trying to make a move as a contender to Comedy Central for original comedies, inching away from just a channel relying on syndicated shows to cull laughs. Their line-up may not be stellar just yet since they're banking too much on cheap family sitcoms instead of anything really original or creative, but Neighbors from Hell is their first original primetime animated series, and they've recently secured a solid late night program by nabbing Conan O'Brien. It'll be fun to see what else they have up their sleeves in the coming year.
