'Cavemen' can't do it
Posted: Tuesday, October 09, 2007 3:00 AM by Rob Neill
Filed Under:
Entertainment, Financial services
We liked the ads, Geico. We really did. Even though some of them at this point probably don’t need another repeat airing.
But when we heard that ABC was going to create a series based on the Geico cavemen, we had mixed emotions. On one hand, stretching out a funny joke for 30 minutes was probably a bad idea ("Saturday Night Live" has problems doing it for five minutes at a time). On the other hand, … OK, so the emotions weren’t exactly mixed.
Then came the news that the show's producers wouldn’t be showing the first episode in advance to critics. That’s not always a bad thing. Usually critics will declare a show must be terrible if it doesn’t get screened for critics. This is only partly true. A movie can be truly bad, yet studios don’t need to screen it because it has a huge built-in audience that doesn’t care what middle-aged print media writers think – just think of every teen slasher movie that’s been made in the past five years.
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However, because “Cavemen” (possibly the most appropriate name since “Snakes on a Plane”) didn’t seem to have a ready-made audience – people who like to watch commercials? advertising executives focusing on car insurance accounts? – it had to be bad. Real bad.
In short, we were pretty sure this thing was gonna stink on ice. But we get paid to do this, so we DVR’d last Tuesday’s debut episode.
Yep. Bad. Not just bad bad. But bad with a message bad. Because after not letting anyone know what the show was going to be about, it turns out to be about (or at least the first episode was) … race relations?
The trio of metrosexual caveguys hang out in San Diego. (Point! San Diego is always unintentionally funny – there’s a reason Ron Burgundy lives there.) Joel, the leader, works at an Ikea-like store. (Point! Assembling furniture with an allen wrench while saying, “It’s 2007, right?” is funny.) Joel falls for a non-cavewoman, and gets the derision of the other two. Get it?!?!
This leads to some painful lines, such as, “Stick to your kind – crave the cave.”
And possibly one of the most disturbing things we’ve heard on TV since, well, ever: “Keep your penis in your genus.”
The rest of it is all stupid jokes about a couple misunderstanding each other and how complicated ordering coffee is in modern America. Yawn.
Perhaps the funniest thing about this show is the fact that it won’t be canceled after one episode (nice headline by the way) despite being resoundingly panned (too many links, but you could go here, here, here, or here – pardon us for a moment as we go take some medicine for pun overdose.)
We figure the show's opening-night ratings benefited from the "train wreck" effect as a lot of people probably tuned in to see just how bad it could be. We wonder how many of them (who weren’t being paid to watch) made it past the first commercial. Our guess: Not many.
By the way, the Gekko isn’t even funny in 15-second increments. No more shows.
You can view the episode here as long as ABC is willing to be associated with the thing.
