TVSquad

(S01E02) Last week's review was not a kind one. I would have called Cavemen a train wreck, except that at least after a train wreck the survivors can begin to pull their lives together and learn to live again. My feeling last week was there was no such recovery possible after an episode of Cavemen.

A lot of the commentators came to the show's defense. There were cries of "it's not that bad" and "it could have been worse!" Not exactly ringing endorsements, but not the universal condemnation that I had been expecting, either. It took the careful consideration of both those comments and tonight's episode for me to figure out what, exactly, was wrong with this show...

Here's the problem with Cavemen: it doesn't need the cavemen. If you take them out, what you're left with is a show that's "not that bad" or a show that "could have been worse." It becomes a fairly forgettable single-camera comedy that could probably exist for a few years, getting its share of viewers and maybe, if it was lucky, an Entertainment Weekly cover when it finally goes off the air in 2012.

What kills the show is the inclusion of the cavemen.

It's kind of like if you threw a party and one of your friends asked if he could invite one of his pals from work. He says nothing about the guy except that he's "nice" and you say sure, no problem, the more the merrier. When the friend from work shows up, he's kind of bland. He wears a polo-shirt tucked in, but with the collar unbuttoned, he tells a few jokes, but isn't obnoxious about it, and he converses fairly well without necessarily being Larry King. At the end of the night, you shake his hand and say "thanks for coming!' and when your friend asks you what you thought of him, you say: "he was so nice!"

Now, imagine the same scenario except that your friend built him up as "The coolest guy at the office. Seriously, my friend, this is a different breed of cat! He's the bee's knees! He's got some serious sizzle on him! He's gonna knock your socks into another dimension! We're talking crazy cool!"

Simply from the build-up you'd hate the guy (you'd also probably wonder why your friend was talking in such weird '40s slang as well, but that's neither here nor there). When he showed to the party, you'd be looking for what made him so special. When he turned out to be just a generally nice, non-threatening guy, you'd be disappointed. You'd angrily tell your friend, "Hey man, thanks for bringing George BLANDa. Nice call on how cool he was!"

It's all in the buildup.

Cavemen has been built up as something special. Not necessarily in the marketing, but simply because it chose to make its main characters four of the ugliest cavemen in the history of filmed entertainment. Just looking at the show, you're inclined to think that it's going to be clever and cool (or, at the very least different).

When it's not, you respond with the kind of review I wrote last week.

Tonight's episode is a perfect example of the cavemen being extraneous to the action. The central premise to the show was that Nick was a bad employee and that his friend, Joel, was forced to come to a decision whether or not to fire him. That's it. It's a classic sitcom setup and it was executed fairly well (I especially enjoyed the bit during arbitration when Nick was forced to watch security camera tapes to prove what a bad employee he was).

Did it make it any funnier that they were cavemen? No. In fact, whenever they go to the cavemen well, the show went off the rails:

-- The crux of Nick's wrongful termination suit played the cavemen-as-minority card again, and not even the most ardent defender of the show would be able to argue that it did so cleverly.

-- Andy trying to get the new neighbor to not be afraid of him. It was not only underdeveloped -- almost like the writers needed a B-story but didn't have their hearts in it -- it was poorly conceived. I guess in this world there are some people who are afraid of cavemen (we're not sure because no rules have been set up) and Andy is determined to show her that he's not a bad guy. His solution? A home invasion. Ahh, yes, that old sitcom trope. Remember when Lucy and Ethel put on Clockwork Orange outfits and went on a multi-state crime spree? That was classic. If this is how cavemen go about getting people to like them, I'd be scared of them too.

This is my advice to ABC: go back over the shows that have been filmed and digitally alter the four leads so that they're not cavemen anymore. Dub any of the cavemen/racial stuff into a new nationality that isn't offensive (The Simpsons have been getting away with mockery of the Irish, Italians and Germans for years; maybe try those). From this point forward, film the show exactly as-is, with the same character types living the same kind of lifestyle, but just have them, you know, not be cavemen.

You can even keep the name Cavemen. It'll be a reference to their backward male way of looking at things. I'm told ladies love it when you point out how dumb men are!

If you do this, I think you'll have a nice, likable show on your hands. If you don't... well, I can't imagine the show lasting past the morbid curiosity phase. But then, what do I know? I'm an Irishman.

Some other things:

-- I called Nick obnoxious in the first episode. He still is, but I'll admit that he made me laugh a few times tonight. Maybe it's because I've known quite a few annoying grad-students in my time and whenever he's talking about his non-existent Ph.D., I'm reminded of those people.

-- Nick is an Apple guy. He and I have that in common. Oh, and also being extremely, sickeningly hairy. (Isn't my wife lucky?)

-- Is it me or did some of the bits seem out of place tonight? I'm thinking most specifically of Joel's boss and his attorney having trouble getting the VCR to work. I guess that people do, sometimes, have trouble getting VCRs to work, but it just seemed an awkward bit ham-handed into the scene unnecessarily. It was almost like the episode ran forty seconds short and they needed to come up with something at the last minute.

-- Why is Andy there? I know he was a character added after the disastrous first pilot, so the producers had to have had a reason for his existence, but geez: we're already two episodes in and he's in a pointless time-killing B-story.

-- Does anyone else wonder if the cavemen have superpowers? Are they extra strong? Can they withstand cold better than we can? Could they bed Barbara Bach and play the drum solo in The End?

All right, that's it for this week. We're uncertain whether there's enough sustainable interest in this show to warrant a weekly review, so this might be my last dispatch from mediocreville. If it is, it was a pleasure reviewing this show for you. Not because I liked it, but because I feel like I've grown so close to you, the readers of this blog. We're war buddies, surviving as best we can. To paraphrase what Iceman once very creepily said to Maverick (video NSFW), you readers can be my wingmen anytime.

As always, I invite you to a much better show on Thursday nights called The Office. Really, it's much more pleasant.