Lifetime: a network famous for its overly dramatic, straight-to-TV movies, and for ruining the much-loved teen sitcom, Saved by the Bell, by creating a behind-the-scenes version of it that sucked all the comedy out and turned it into drama. While we have to admit, Lifetime movies can be a guilty pleasure, it seems the network can’t be trusted around our favorite shows. In 2015, they aired The Unauthorized Full House Story, a show drawn from the memoirs of the late Bob Saget. Unfortunately, no one from the original series was down to participate and the stand-in actors just had nothing on the original cast.
Then, of course, there was the writing. As New York Daily News explained, “Unauthorized captures the feel-good part. Unfortunately, it misses the “written well” part. Like, completely.” Lifetime failed to do Full House any justice and Unauthorized was more like a Full House-themed fever dream.
2013: Dads
As we’ve just seen, dad-centric comedies may well be a hitherto unrealized curse within the new era of television. Adding some support to this conspiracy theory is the Fox show, Dads. Released in 2013, Dads seemed on the surface to have all the makings of a hit. The cast included Seth Green, of Scream, Robot Chicken and Family Guy fame, and a solid bunch of lesser known but talented actors. It was, perhaps the premise that tripped them up. The sitcom was to center on a pair of video game developers who fall into the strange predicament of having both their fathers need to move in with them at the same time.
While this is an unlikely setup, it’s not the weirdest we’ve seen in the world of sitcoms. However, when paired with “lazy writing,” critics and audiences just weren’t buying it. TV Guide Magazine didn’t hold back in its denigration of the failed show - “Dads would love to be as offensive as its promos promise, but what’s most off-putting about the show is how lazy and stale it all is.” It seems, perhaps, that the 2000s heralded in a new era of sitcoms, one that has no time for stale old dad jokes.
2015: Dr. Ken
Having enjoyed great success, and an ardent following of fans, from shows like Community and The Hangover, Ken Jeong seemed an obvious choice to take on a starring role in his own show. Seeing the hype that was building around the comedian, ABC decided to capitalize on it with the creation of a show in which Jeong would play the lead. Dr. Ken seemed perfect for Jeong, especially since (and trust us, we were as shocked to learn this as you’re about to be) the cocaine-guzzling crazy man who demanded “but did you die?” in The Hangover is actually a fully qualified doctor in real life.
What caused Jeong’s sitcom to fail was, strangely, the very thing that caused him to be so successful in all his other ventures. The Louis Post-Dispatch explained what the problem was: “ too much Ken Jeong. His manic energy takes over every frame of the pilot, at the expense of anything and anyone else in the show,”
2016: Fuller House
It seems no-one learned their lesson from that first attempt at reviving Full House. Though, to give them credit, the creators of 2016’s Fuller House did have John Stamos and the gang from the original series on board. 90s kids the world over rejoiced, as Netflix built up the hype for their official reboot. However, this ended up being another case of too much hype with nothing substantial to deliver. Fans became annoyed with the excessive carrying on about the reunion.
Time magazine captured the feelings of critics and fans alike: “Fuller House has nothing more to offer than a look at what an old show’s actors and format look like in the present day.” Points have to be given to the producers for perfectly recreating the original set. They were also able to convince all of the original actors, apart from the Olsen twins, to take part. However, the old jokes just didn’t fly in the new setting, and there’s only so many times you can sigh and reflect on how much things have changed, before it just gets tedious.
2017: Marvel’s Inhumans
While Marvel may be breaking box office records with the insane levels of success it enjoys with its comic-based films, they somehow managed to fail miserably when they tried to translate their talents into TV. Maybe the small screen just isn’t big enough for all their oomph? That seems to have been a concern for the producers, anyway, because they actually aired the first episode of their made-for-TV series, Marvel’s Inhumans, in IMAX theaters. The 2017 series was then shifted to what was supposed to be its permanent home on ABC. Even with this epic introduction, Inhumans just failed to impress.
Ken Tucker, of Yahoo TV, perhaps put it best: “I’d like to say that Marvel’s Inhumans is so spectacularly awful, it’s worth tuning in just to witness the superhero train-wreck. But alas, Inhumans does not even yield sarcastic pleasures–it’s just bad. Bad in a dull way, bad in an irritating way… Marvel’s Inhumans is just inhumane.”