Eh…Gotham’s going to end soon and I’m losing interest in Empire. I’ll give this a shot.
Aside from the fact that this whole endeavor looks really chancy (there’s a very good reason the rural purge happened), I’m just not seeing where the humor is going to come from long-term. “House is a deathtrap where stuff breaks all the time”, “country folk are untrustworthy clods”, and “overprotective mother is completely clueless about farm animals” are all going to get extremely old extremely fast. Furthermore, the advantage of a setting like New York is that it has tons of stuff that a writer can build episodes around. This farm has…a ramshackle house and a lot of dirt.
Still, there’s nothing I can see that looks completely unwatchable, so what the heck, maybe they pull the upset. If nothing else, should be more watchable than The Muppets.
Wondering what everyone thought of it - It’s in no way going to become a classic, but it was ok. The problem with the first episode was that I think I saw most of it in bits and pieces in the previews they’ve been showing steady for the last month. I was never a Dax fan until Parenthood and I like him even more now that I’ve been listening to his podcast, Armchair Expert.
You sound like my father, possibly the only person in the western world who hated The Andy Griffith Show. He thought it made small-town North Carolinians (such as he himself) look ignorant and quaint.
It’s like my dad always said, it all depends on whose bull is being gored.
I loved Movin’ On as a kid. Anything to do with trucks and trucking, and I was there. I read in TV Guide how truckers hated the show. They pointed out how unrealistic it was. And they were right. As was your father.
So we have a couple of clueless transplants who care about all the wrong things…an incredibly nosy neighbor who could be a total creep but is probably just super weird…a jack-of-all-trades old guard who at least seems sympathetic…and the family trying to buy them out to serve as a foil. Meanwhile the home is a wreck and the farm is dead.
The best-case scenario seems to be to follow the Last Man on Earth formula, i.e. start with nothing, get a few cheap laughs watching the dumb couple flail around, then introduce outside elements, nail down the basic structure of this place, and get the first real plotlines up and running. It’s a risk (and I was never a fan of LMoE), but I’m not sure that there’s any other shot of making it past the first season.
I’ll give it a couple more episodes, but so far I’m not seeing a replacement for The Muppets. At least I could see the potential for a wickedly funny show there.
OK, thanks to my sister’s DVR, I just watched the first episode.
Oy vey…
It’s very annoying to me when the previews show most all of the gags that you’ll see in the finished episode.
Rudy (Ed Begly Jr.) is much creepier than I expected - and not in a good way.
The neighbors wanting to buy the farm are not even interesting enough to dislike. Fortunately, Dax Shepherd should die in a fire so, on the whole, it balances.
I’m willing to watch a few more episodes to see if they find their footing but I’ll wager a week’s pay this show never sees season 2.
Yeah, I felt the same way, for the same reasons. Lots of young city people (that I met when i went to college) didn’t get the absurdity, and thought it was real. Maybe not when they thought about it, but it shaped their assumptions about the kids from the countryside.
Nope. Dear God, I couldn’t even make it through the YouTube trailer.
Yep, you just summed up the entire series in once sentence.
It looks REALLY bad. Too much wackiness, not enough small town humor. They should be thinking more Northern Exposure and less Green Acres if they want a successful comedy about a big city couple moving to the small town. Then again it’s been done to death. Once series that was MUCH better than I expected it to be was Hart of Dixie. Unfortunately I didn’t watch it until after it was cancelled. Only to find out it was a much smarter show than it seems when you hear that Rachel Bilson is a NY Surgeon.
Anyway, I won’t be watching Bless this Mess, until it’s been on for 4 or 5 seasons.
Horrendous. A completely spastic mess, zero laughs, royally half-baked “sexual tension”, don’t even have any idea what kind of tone it’s going for, and I’ve counted no fewer than four characters who have the potential to become The Irredeemable Slimeball With Total Immunity Who Ends Up Singlehandedly Ruining Absolutely Everything (Rudy, the long-distance mother, the cop, the farm owner).
And of course, this is the critically-acclaimed laugh-out-loud hit of the season for some reason. :rolleyes:
One more episode. I want to know if this comedy is going to crash and burn the fastest I’ve seen in my life. It’s going to be tough to top Son of Zorn (remember that one?), but at this rate it definitely looks possible.
Lake Bell’s character reminded me of Paul Reiser on Mad About You, or a Seinfeld character. Her rapid-fire speech and mannerisms were probably meant to be funny, but just annoyed the crap out of me.
I think my husband liked the show. :dubious:
