Fox continues its full Fall 2013 premiere week tonight with its comedies. Zooey Deschanel’s New Girl and Mindy Kaling’s The Mindy Project are both returning to hold down the 9 p.m. hour, but at 8 p.m., two very different comedies get started.
Up first is Dads, produced by Seth MacFarlane. The show is getting slammed by critics and has been dogged by bad press for months. The show stars Seth Green and Giovanni Ribisi as video game developers who get stuck living with their fathers, played by Martin Mull and Peter Riegert. Critics have called it racist and sexist, in short, it’s as raunchy as you’d expect a MacFarlane-approved project to be. But few are laughing.
Last month, the Media Action Network for Asian Americans called on Fox to reshoot the pilot, but Fox said it could not, essentially pulling the “wait and see” card. The network’s argument is that the show and its characters will develop over time, but how much time will viewers give it?
“...The list of people who should be offended by Dads is not limited to any one ethnic group,” writes TIME critic James Poniewozik. “There are also conservatives, whom the show casually associates with being racist. There are old people, whom the show paints as both bigoted and clueless. There are the women characters, who so far are objects or shrews.”
Brooklyn Nine-Nine is very different and has to be one of the most anticipated shows of the Fall season. It stars SNL’s Andy Samberg as a detective and comes from Parks & Recreation producers Michael Schur and Dan Goor. So far, the show is getting great reviews.
“For the moment, the squad is mostly just a collection of types, but that's not unusual for the first episode of any series,” writes USA Today’s Robert Bianco. “The details will (or had better) be filled in later; what matters for the moment is that the characters have potential and the actors have the ability to bring that potential to life.”
Dads airs tonight at 8 p.m. and Brooklyn Nine-Nine starts at 8:30 p.m.
image: Fox