Mr. Sunshine (ABC – Wednesday, 9:30 p.m.)

Matthew Perry stars as Ben Donovan, the general manager of the Sunshine Center, who every night navigates a never-ending series of bizarre requests, curious mishaps and employee screw ups to put on a show for 18,000 screaming people.

Working alongside him is his boss and arena owner Crystal, attractive, powerful and highly erratic; Alice, the cute, tomboyish marketing director and Ben’s friend with benefits; Alonzo, a former basketball player, handsome and unbelievably happy; Ben’s assistant, Heather, pretty, sweet, but terrifying because she once lit a boyfriend on fire; and Crystal’s son, Roman, sweet-faced, clueless and Ben’s newest employee.

“Mr. Sunshine” stars Matthew Perry (“Friends”) as Ben, Allison Janney (“The West Wing”) as Crystal, Andrea Anders as Alice, James Lesure as Alonzo and Nate Torrence as Roman. – ABC

2 out of 10

They say that familiarity breeds contempt and that particular axiom has special meaning for this “comedy” offering from ABC.  You see, everything is familiar about this show and for that we have contempt for it.  The story is familiar as it’s obviously just a cheap rip-off of NBC’s 30 Rock, the characters are familiar as they are obviously just cheap rip-offs of the characters on NBC’s 30 Rock, the stale jokes are familiar as they are obviously just cheap rip-offs of the jokes on 30 Rock, and the style of the show is familiar as it is – you guessed it – obviously just a cheap rip-off of 30 Rock.

Mr. Sunshine is unoriginal tripe.  As noted, the jokes aren’t original, they aren’t funny and there are really no likable characters.  The attempts at slapstick fail completely and the only message  we can really ascertain at the end of each episode is “don’t tune in again next week unless you want to more crap.”  We would also really like to know whose brilliant idea was it to make a sports arena as a backdrop for a show.  Have the writers been reduced to Mad Libs or are they just pulling slips of paper out of a hat for story ideas, now?  Also, actors delivering their dialogue like a machine gun doesn’t make it any funnier.

There’s one more thing that’s familiar about this show that needs to be addressed: Matthew Perry.  No offense to the guy, but we’re sick of him.  He does nothing for anything he is in.  He’s not horrible, he’s just vanilla… milquetoast… bland.  Like every other cast member on that horrible piece-of-crap show, Friends (we don’t care if you watched it… you know it sucks) they gave him a shot to do films in the 1990’s and 2000’s and like every other cast member with maybe the exception of Jennifer Aniston (we qualify Aniston with a “maybe” because although she’s had some successful films and her name is a draw because we guess she was hot at one point and married to Brad Pitt, other than Office Space, her films are crap) he has a history of box office failures and television failures.  The only films that were even worth watching that this guy has been in were  The Whole Nine Yards and Fools Rush In and the only reason why those two films were worth investing in was because one starred Bruce Willis and the other one starred Selma Hayek.  We’re sorry, but Perry simply does not bring much more to the table in 2011 than he has for the last 15 years.  If you don’t believe us, simply look at his résumé and tell us that we’re wrong.

We’re also finding the similarities to this show and 30 Rock a little creepy.  Has anyone else caught the fact that in 2006, NBC debuted two shows about what goes on backstage at a sketch comedy show, one of a highly acclaimed sit com in the form of 30 Rock and the other a highly acclaimed drama called Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and that only 30 Rock was kept and that 30 Rock is now in its fifth season?  Has anyone else caught the fact that Matthew Perry was a regular cast member on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and has hardly worked since?

Here’s our theory:

Perry is trying to make up for the success that he didn’t have on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip by duplicating almost everything in 30 Rock, the show that, let’s face it, won the battle at NBC amongst the shows about sketch comedy shows.  Now, why do we suggest that this is creepy or even happening?  Well, normally we don’t wait around for end credits when watching anything on VOD but we did for this because we wanted to see who the production company was.  To our surprise it was none other than Perry’s own production company, Anhedonia Productions.  You see, Perry co-wrote the pilot and is responsible for this mess coming to ABC and we feel it is his attempt to get back to the status that he once had in the 1990’s on television.

What makes it especially creepy is the name of the production company: “Anhedonia.” Ahedonia is a psychiatric condition defined as  an inability to experience pleasurable emotions from normally pleasurable life events such as eating, exercise, social interaction or sexual activities (i.e., joy).  It is a symptom associated with schizophrenia and drug addiction, in particular with amphetamines which Perry is well-known to have had addiction problems with.  The name of the production company, Perry’s history and the show’s tagline (as seen in the poster above) “Oh, Joy.” is not very encouraging to us.  Maybe we’re looking into this too much and this is only a strange bunch of coincidences but we’d be remiss if we didn’t do the analysis.

So, is the ironically named Mr. Sunshine really an attempt at sit com gold or is it just a desperate expression of melancholy from Perry.  We don’t know but we do know that it’s pretty awful and it has no business being the lead-out for Modern Family.

Watch full episodes of Mr. Sunshine, here.

Fall 2010 Post-Game Wrap-Up (Sunday)

It’s that time of year again, folks.  The time where we come together to say good-bye to an old year and we usher a in a new one.  At TV-Tastic, it’s also the time of year where we review the Fall 2010 television lineup, tell you what was good, what sucked and everything in between and why as well as where all of these shows are going to be in the new year (if they haven’t gotten canceled already).  Keep in mind that it’s only the stuff we watched for the most part so not every piece of schlock is in here.  So let the games begin.

Sunday

8:00 p.m.

FOX – The Simpsons

We gave up on The Simpsons around 2000 because frankly, it had gotten to the point where they were abusing the social commentary satire that they were famous for and basically began preaching and not being funny.  The biggest problem really was that strayed away from the old format of filling every obscure situation with a good joke.  That being said, we’ve been dipping our toes back into the Simpsons water for the last couple of years and we have to say that this season is one of the funniest in a very long time.  It is as brilliant and original in this its 22nd season as it was during its first ten.  They’ve brought back everything that made The Simpsons great and we love it.

8:30 p.m.

FOX – The Cleveland Show

We have to be honest: we don’t like The Cleveland Show.  We think it’s incredibly poorly written, a poor rip-off of Family Guy and ridiculously exploits racial stereotypes with little-to-no comedic value.  We’re still trying to figure out why Cleveland Brown was given his own show to begin with.  The random Cleveland appearance on Family Guy was always funny but the character was never written to be a major presence even on that show so why would the producers think setting him or any secondary character up with their own series is a good idea?  The only positive statement we can make about Cleveland this season is that it is slightly funnier than it was last season, but we seriously don’t know if you can call going from a 1 to a 3 on a scale of 10 an accomplishment.   Anyway, apparently we’re the idiots because FOX has already renewed it for another season.  Waitaminute… this is FOX we’re talking about, after all.  Maybe we’re not the idiots after all.

9:00 p.m.

FOX – Family Guy

We’ve been devoted fans of Family Guy since its pilot episode on Fox in 1999.  Needless to say, we were heartbroken when it was canceled by the idiots at FOX in 2002, and subsequently rejoiced when it was resurrected again in 2005 (thank you, Cartoon Network).  When it first came back after the hiatus, we were kind of disappointed as it just didn’t feel like the same show.  The jokes weren’t as funny, weren’t as fast and more importantly, the musical numbers had all but disappeared and any true fan will tell you, the musical numbers were what made old-school Family Guy so damned good.

After a couple of seasons of kind of boring us to death (with the exception of a few standout episodes) there was something else that we picked up that was really starting to bug us:  Family Guy was becoming very mean-spirited with their jokes.  Now, Family Guy has never shied away from controversy and we’ve never had a problem with the shock-value material, but some of this stuff was just downright awful, alienating and again, very mean-spirited.  Old-school Family Guy, as controversial as it was, was NEVER mean and it didn’t have to be because the material stood on its own.  It was becoming very clear to long-time fans and objective viewers that Family Guy was resorting to these tactics because the writing frankly wasn’t that good and they knew it.

Near the end of the 2007 – 2008 season, we had decided that as much as we didn’t want to do it,  we were going to remove Family Guy from DVR schedule in the Fall of 2008 if we didn’t see marked improvement.

We can honestly say now that we’re certainly glad we gave Family Guy a chance because like The Simpsons, Family Guy began to go back to what made the show great and left the mean-spiritedness behind.  The show has gotten progressively better over the past two seasons (with more musical numbers to boot) and this season is one of the funniest in history.

We normally just erase shows immediately after watching them off the DVR but Family Guy has become so good again that you literally have to watch an episode at least twice to catch the jokes you missed the first time around because you were laughing so hard and so long at one joke that the next one blew right by you.  THAT is what Family Guy was all about.  This season’s episode, Excellence in Broadcasting guest-starring (of all people) Rush Limbaugh may be the funniest episode in the history of the series… I’m not kidding.   It’s definitely up there with the greats such as Wasted Talent, Petarded and PTV.  We don’t care if you love Limbaugh or hate him, if you can’t appreciate how brilliant that episode is, you should not be watching Family Guy.

Watch that full episode here.

Here is one of the funniest scenes ever done on Family Guy from the episode Baby, You Knock Me Out, again, from this season and available in its entirety here.

HBO – Boardwalk Empire

We did a review the night after the series premiere of Boardwalk Empire where we proclaimed that it was the best show on television (the review can be read here.).  After watching the entire first  season there is absolutely nothing I would change about my analysis of this series, it is the best show on television… period.  That being said, as ana aside, there is something that I have noticed on the series for some time now that viewers really should be aware of.  The show isn’t completely historically accurate.  In the aggregate, yes, the overall story is true, but many of the nitty-gritty details have been dramatized… A LOT.  For example: there’s a whole storyline about Warren G. Harding’s mistress who had his baby.  In reality, this story of the mistress and the baby was a rumor that was never historically confirmed yet Boardwalk Empire puts it into the storyline as if it were fact.  We have no problem with creative license, but there should be full disclosure especially from a fictional show that revolves around actual historical figures.  Just sayin’, is all.

Showtime – Dexter

Well, Dexter has officially gone 24 on us.  Allow us to explain:  After four seasons of improving storylines, 24 had its masterpiece season in season 4.  The problem is that there was absolutely no way the producers could ever top that season so the next three seasons seemed disappointing by comparison.  This is exactly what happened with Dexter in season 5.  Season 4 of Dexter with John Lithgow as “The Trinity Killer” was one of the best seasons in television history and had one the best shock-finale of any series in recent memory and that hurt season 5.  The anticipation was so built-up because of season 4 that this season, although very good, was a bit of a let-down and nowhere near as satisfying as season 4.  We still love the series and we can’t wait until season 6 airs but the fans need to understand that season 4 was the defining season and its never going to get any better than that.

9:30 p.m.

FOX – American Dad

American Dad has been the one consistent bright spot in the FOX ‘Animation Domination’ lineup on Sunday night. The show is absolutely hilarious and every now and then they throw in an episode that completely breaks from the sitcom fare and goes into the column of “epic event.” If you’ve seen the Christmas episode from season five Rapture’s Delight, you know what we’re talking about.

Unfortunately, it seems as if American Dad is always on the list of shows to be canceled each year and this season is no different. I blame the time-slot and usually I would just say “don’t worry, it will be picked up next year,” but this year we were a little concerned because of the mid-season replacement, Bob’s Burgers looked VERY funny based on the sneak-preview we saw on the Family Guy: It’s a Trap! Blu-Ray. That being said, FOX has had a history of trying to upset the apple cart in recent years on Sunday night and it hasn’t worked. Besides the fact that none of the shows they’ve tried to knock off American Dad with have been very good, I think audiences have gotten very comfortable with American Dad and though its audience numbers haven’t been as huge as Family Guy, they’ve been consistent.

Also, now that we’ve had a chance to see Bob’s Burgers, we think it’s safe to say that it won’t be around long.  Read the full review of Bob’s Burgers, here.

Next, we take a look at Mondays.