Well, every once in a while I'll hit the internet to see if I can turn up one of the remaining items on the 'ol Chabert-a-Tron 3000, and we came up yahtzee, finding the unaired TV Pilot for a little show called She Said/ He Said - a title sure to plague any SEO and likely made IT folks very sad if this got aired.
Fortunately, they were never in any danger of that. This pilot is so bad, it's absolutely stunning anyone wanted to make it based on the script alone.
Yeah. Just dreadful.
Like, I get that Nick Lachey was a thing in the 00's. And he's not even terrible here - he's trying his best with material I'd describe charitably as "terrible and embarrassing". But he's also certainly not ready to anchor a sitcom.
The entire pilot is essentially two awful and unlikable dimbulbs (Nick Lachey and Lindsay Sloane) meeting and insisting on seeing each other in scenarios where they do not like each other but deep down, really want to @#$%. So everyone has to hear about it, because that's the kind of drama queens they both are - the kind that make their friends and family listen to them recount their dates. And, of course, we have to see what (A) they told on their side, and (B) what the other person said - fundamentally meaning we're watching everything twice. OR - even worse - recounted as a an anecdote twice as we cut back and forth to a neutral view, making three takes we have to see.
But, look, these characters are awful. All of them. Our two leads both lack any charm or wit, and there's nothing to win you over. Their friends are clones of each other. Chabert plays the married sister of the girl in this scenario, and she's constantly talking about how great marriage is, and how she found her ideal man - the person who believes in love, and she has a slightly more practical married counterpart. Lachey has a friend who is basically the O-Face guy from Office Space whose character is "horny and dumb". His equivalent is the hot friend who thinks guys are disposable.
The level of discourse between the guys, especially, seems like it was written by an 18 year old high school girl who had only seen Porky's movies to get an idea of what men are like.
So every interaction needs to be reviewed by two committees. This is the idea for the show. It is physically painful by the mid-point of the pilot. And there was no future here. You can't do this 13-22 episodes a year, and for 100 episodes til you wind up in syndication (old TV rules, kids). It doesn't make any sense.
Chabert isn't on the show much - I'm not sure if the video doesn't show the whole pilot or just the best edit they bothered with when it was clear the show wasn't going anywhere. But she's actually fine. Unlike everyone else, she seems like she's not trying to remember her lines or waiting to say her lines. Like - she's in the moment and acting, which seems like a low bar. But that's where we are with thing thing.
Mostly, you know the fact that she's happy to be married means the show would have humiliated her within the first season, her marriage turning out to be a sham. Because that was SOP for a comedy show on TV in 00's.
As it turned out, this was not a TV movie, so IMDB is wrong. It's just a pilot for a 30 minute show. And I suspect that's true of 3 of the four remaining items on The Chabert-a-Tron 3000. So if I can locate the goofily-titled The Telling of the Shoes, we may have won the day.
No comments:
Post a Comment