The media have lately been celebrating the remarkable comeback of the sitcom, which had seen better days. Modern Family continues to outperform itself; Community dazzles with its inventiveness; Suburgatory perfectly captures the suburbs-are-hell trope with wit and bite; Happy Endings has surprised many by becoming a hit; and CBS’s 2 Broke Girls is poised to become television’s most-watched comedy. But for all the talk about revitalized formats and audience engagement this past fall, this doesn’t account for Work It and Rob, two midseason comedy offerings that are so awful they may in fact be harbingers of the Fall of Man.
While this may be hyperbolic, Rob and Work It do symbolize how far the sitcom format has fallen, at any rate. It’s hard to perfectly capture the intense sense of fiery rage that I felt in watching these hackneyed and humorless failures. Both Rob and Work It are deeply offensive in their own ways, but the real crime is that Rob, which launches on CBS on Thursday, and its ABC sibling lack any real sense of humor. Work It had seemingly plumbed the nadir of the television comedy, and it seemed it couldn’t get any worse. Wrong! It can get worse, and does with Rob.
Rob—which was previously known as ¡Rob! but, for reasons known only to CBS upper management, the network dropped the upside-down exclamation point, making copy editors everywhere sigh with relief—stars Rob Schneider as Rob, a sad sack and OCD-prone gringo who marries Maggie, a drop-dead-gorgeous Mexican-American woman (Claudia Bassols), after dating her for only six weeks. Their wedding—which, naturally, takes place on the spur of the moment at a Las Vegas chapel—comes as a terrible surprise to Maggie’s sprawling family, who never envisioned her with a short, white husband. Hilarity, as they say, is meant to ensue.
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Comments
It may become TV's most watched new comedy of the season. This statement is misleading Jace. BTW Jace, I love reading your commentary, this is not meant to be derisive.