Question: You and every other critic warned us that Cavemen was horrible, but I decided to check it out anyway. I imagined it as a traditional comedy that just used the cavemen issue for the occasional good joke. In fact, I thought it would be just as silly but as fun as Dinosaurs was in the early '90s. But instead of a show that acknowledged its silly gimmick, I found a show that actually thinks it is genius. I felt like the people behind the show were screaming, "Look at us! We are quirky! We are original! Admire us for our imaginative, offensive-to-none look at social problems! We are a serious show but still have a sense of humor!" Everyone knows that if you have to tell someone you have a serious side or a sense of humor, you don't have either. On the plus side, it made Carpoolers look really funny.
Answer: That's the first time I've seen Carpoolers and "really funny" in the same sentence. And hopefully the last. (And how bummed were you to learn that Cavemen is now set in San
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Question: I like the cavemen commercials, too. I never watch sitcoms; I mostly stick to news programs and the History and Discovery channels. The last sitcom I watched was ALF, and I'm 61 years old now. I'm just trying to figure out what time it's coming on.
Answer: So funny, I was just doing a Fall Preview presentation the other day and someone likened Cavemen to ALF as a show that may be seemingly so dumb it's smarter than it looks and that could end up staying on the air (in ALF's case, for four seasons) much longer than anyone would have expected. I had "no problem" with ALF myself — in fact, for several years I had a miniature ALF attached to my computer terminal at work for some reason — but ALF had no pretensions of being anything but silly, goofy fun. Cavemen, at least from the original pilot we've screened (to be replaced by another we haven't seen yet), is aiming to be something of a racial allegory, which is just about as crudely distasteful as it is unfunny. I'll be curiou ...
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