I only saw the previews of their big TV premier, and I was… not impressed. Is it s bad as I think it might have been? It looked bloody awful!
The Pitts is apparently about a family that has horrendously bad luck. For example:
Father Guy says something about having fixed the refrigerator icemaker. Goes to get glass of water from said fridge. Gets electrocuted and catches on fire. wave shis hands about madly on fire. Wife sprays him with fire redardant. He get up and proclaims to the world that he found alucky penny on the floor. Laugh track.
Not as awful as it could have been. A few funny lines, but overall pretty routine. It would have worked better as a cartoon than live action.
I did get the impression that I’d seen at least one of the jokes in a promo last fall or earlier. Was the show scheduled for the fall but put on the shelf after Fox saw it?
SHUDDER
It was horrible. Even with Melissa Peterman (BJ from Reba) playing the psycho, it was just plain horrible.
The laugh track was so fakey it hurt.
I watched it. I wanted to change the channel after the first segment, but was drawn to it the way a rubbernecker is drawn to a 523-car pileup with lots and lots of twisted steel wreckage and the burning smell of motor oil, brake fluid and gasoline. I couldn’t change the channel simply because I knew I’d probably never see something this bad again; and I wanted to sear into my brain the image of bad televison forever, so that someday, when my kids are older, I’ll be able to tell them how lucky they are, that they never had to deal with truly horrific television that was, well… The Pitts.
I’d say it was lame but there are lame things everywhere that would take offense at being classed with The Pitts.
Welbywife had to restrain me from scooping out my eyes with spoons and piercing my eardrums with red hot pokers in an attempt to ensure I never saw or heard any part of that crap show for the rest of my life.
Okay, I wasn’t crazy about it, but I didn’t think it was as bad as the rest of you.
It was uneven (to say the least) but what confused me is that the family is supposed to have the worst luck in the world, right? Certainly they established that in the first five minutes. Then they immediately run into someone (the psycho) who’s an even bigger loser than they are.
But the question I kept asking was “why is this better than Andy Richter?”
Not to beat it to death, but not enough can be said about the laugh track. It had to have been the loudest and most obnoxious and overused one I’ve ever heard; if Richard Pryor, Robin Williams, and Eddie Murphy had done a trio at the height of their careers they wouldn’t have gotten bigger laughs than when one of the teenagers makes a “wacky zany madcap” retort that somebody who’d never seen a sitcom could still have seen coming from 70 miles away. The show was mediocre on its own, but the laugh track lowered it three rings in the Television Inferno (meaning it now shares a level with FACTS-OF-LIFE [the Cloris Leachman years] and about 21 ghosts of series slaughtered by Don Rickles).
Ironic that MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE is 20 times funnier but doesn’t have any laughter at all, almost as if they think the audience will know when it’s funny all by themselves.
Producer: “Here’s my idea, Mr. FOX Network Executive. We’ll do a mediocre sitcom, with the child-molesting dad from Happiness and the masseuse/hooker from Six Feet Under as the parents. We’ve got scores of untalented writers lined up, and Generic Living Room Set #51 ready to shoot on Stage 13. But the key is, we’ll use the worst laugh track imaginable. We’ll crank it up real loud after every joke, half-joke, almost-joke, facial expression, or musical cue. And then we’ll switch it off immediately, so it sounds nothing like actual human laughter. It’ll just be this sharp, cacophonous noise punctuating the show like cactus needles in a cupcake!”
FOX Exec: “Nobody could argue with that brilliant logic! You’ve got yourself a show, Producer. Somebody call Andy Richter and tell him to clean out his office!”