Allen Gregory is the most fucked up new show of the season. It will not last the year, it can’t, its too horrible for words.
For those who don’t know, picture if you will, the distilled pretentiousness of a million yuppies wrung out of their crushed bodies and forced anally into the rectum of a pregnant woman that creates a siamese twin of double-douchebagginess. Pull those fetuses out of her womb at 6 months, kill one twin and feed it to the other, then grow the abomination that remains in a vat of Perrier. Then, travel back in time, dump the newborn on the Pharoah’s lap and have him raise it to 7, killing Moses at the same time so he’d never known a world without absolute power plentiful slaves, and you have Allen Gregory.
Look Jonah Hill, its nice you lost all that weight, but did you have to coalesce the remaining skin and fat, mix it with a pile of dog feces, and throw it into the teleportation chamber from The Fly along with a copy of only the smarmy side of Jeremy Piven’s character from Entourage? I hate this show. I hate the characters, I hate everything about it. If the multiverse exists, and this universe is somehow real, I would merge our universes together with it and turn everyone into mutant hybrids of our other selves just to hurt Allen Gregory.
I mean come on! Aren’t main characters with their name in the title at least supposed to be somewhat interesting and likeable? Even if he’s a jerk sometimes, at least there’s a lovable side or a funny side or a sweet side or anything that can make viewers want to come back every week and watch him! I can find no atom in Allen’s entire body that is likeable, and that I wouldn’t mix with gunpowder and detonate if I could. Who the fuck is the audience for this show, cannibals? There was probably more murders during that half hour last night than the entire previous month combined!
For those who didn’t watch this show, and nor should you ever, Allen Gregory is a precocious 6 or 7 year old, born to a gay man who’s somewhat of a power player in finance or Hollywood or whatever. And don’t misunderstand me when I say he’s precocious: he’s not Malcolm from Malcolm in the Middle precocious, he’s Mr. Burns from the Simpsons if he killed a child and started wearing his skin around and living his life precocious.
In his tiny, besuited body lies every single yuppie stereotype Hollywood has about itself magnified by a hundred. He’s a filthy rich, entitled, childish (not as an innocent child, but as a tantrum throwing creature from a dimension where screaming is the only form of communication), spoiled brat. He’s new money, not old money, his father being some kind of a wealthy man with his gay boyfriend living in a penthouse in a big city. Allen speaks like a 50 year old Hollywood agent, calls people on his cell phone at lunch, and instructs his teacher that he’s fine with respect as long as she realizes they’re equals.
Its not just the stuff he says. Hell, I’m fine with the exaggerated silliness of Stewie trying to kill Lois with his cache of supervillain weapons, but Allen Gregory doesn’t rise (or sink) to that level of humor. His show is played more straight, a normalish universe with him as the odd ball, like a Twilight Zone episode where only the main character can see what’s wrong while everyone else goes on their merry way. But the character is just an excuse to get pissed and punch a wall. He was probably created to make sure chain gangs worked harder by working them into a rage and directing that anger at rocks or garbage or whatever it is that chain gangs do.
This was show so abhorrent that 7 minutes in I couldn’t stand it, but I kept watching to give it a chance. I turned it off 10 mins later, having reached my decade’s quota of rage, the swear jar smashed, the stress ball crushed into a two dimensional plane that stretches from here to Saturn.
Am I alone in this? There is absolutely no redeeming characteristic about this boy. He’s callous and myopic, stubbornly selfish, cruel to some random girl named Julie who’s living in his house, and the worst: he’s just not funny. I have never not wanted to laugh as much as I did last night when watching this, and I suffered through that Charlie Verducci episode of Married with Children.
The plot was completely secondary but I’l recount some of it here. The family: Allen, his dads, and some kid named Julie living with them, is apparently going through a tough economic time and will have to send Allen to public school (even though he’s being tutored by his dad’s boyfriend). He goes, getting into trouble and wacky situations with his 50 year old man brain and new money pretentiousness and falls in love with the veiny-boobed, morbidly obese 60 year old principal. She rejects him, he has a crises, and it was about this time when the black servant walked in to dispense some life advice to Allen that I had to turn it off.
The only way this show could be saved is if the next week featured 30 mins of Allen being caught in some kind of SAW-like torture puzzle where he’s constantly being fed pain and suffering through all his orifices. In the end, he dies and the show moves on the next week with a new main character.