Tonight at 8/7c, DADS premieres on FOX.  A show about two best friends who run a successful video game company with each other and who have nagging, racist, aging fathers.  Done right, the show really could be hilarious – aging old men cracking wise about the good old days while their sons have to deal with having them around.  Come to think of it, that’s basically the log line of the show, and on paper, I’d watch that show.  Martin Mull and Peter Reigert (the DADS in question) are normally two very funny men (I once sat across from Mull for 15 minutes, and laughed hysterically from minute 1 to 15).  For that matter, Giovanni Ribisi and Seth Green are two very funny men.  Brenda Song, when given good material, can actually make me laugh, and Tonita Castro’s Fausta was one of the great things about now-canceled GO ON.

But if we talk in hypotheticals, we’d be here all day.  The long and short of it is this:  their show – the writing, the acting, the racial insensitivity, the cliche sub-2.5MEN humor – it’s not remotely hilarious, or, for that matter, really any fun at all.  At lot of posts have been written about how the show is offensive, and that’s normally not something that bothers me.  THE LEAGUE can be terribly offensive but I laugh at every episode.  The main issue I now have, two episodes into DADS (which was created by Seth MacFarlane, did I mention that?), is that the laugh track is trying DESPERATELY to get me to realize there’s a joke there, or coming, and I am having none of it.  If you believe FOX, you don’t need to listen to the critics, and you’ll love DADS in spite of the terrible reviews.  I’m telling you not to believe FOX – even without the tasteless jokes, that, let’s be honest, we’ve seen MacFarlane do, and better, the show is a bad sitcom full of bad jokes and worse cliches.  Skip it, and thank me later.

If you’ve made it this far, and are still interested, check out some gallery images and episodic pictures from the pilot (hover over for an image description, and click on the images for a pop up slideshow)!