You know, it seems like only yesterday that David Spade was on Comedy Central — about the coolest thing David Spade has done in years — making fun of CBS with a hilarious clip reel lampooning its blood-soaked procedural dramas.
But now, he's doing a sitcom for CBS called "Rules of Engagement." As you'll read below, the soul sinks.
Occasionally on the TV beat, a program comes along which challenges the shopworn assumptions that television, and by extension the bleary-eyed community of TV critics and viewers, make about TV shows. Something that turns the old order just a few degrees sideways and makes us sit up straight and take notice.
"Rules of Engagement" is not such a show.
Debuting at 8:30 CT tonight on CBS, this utterly familiar and formulaic sitcom about two couples and their swingin' bachelor pal recycles elements -- including, no doubt, the audience laughter -- from the comedies that have been CBS's Monday-night bread-and-butter since the late 1980s.
The fact that some truly funny sitcom actors are in it, notably Patrick "Puddy" "The Tick" Warburton and Megyn Price (who was in a hysterical Al Franken sitcom "Lateline" way back when), does little to move this show out of the dead-center sweet spot that CBS executives have intended for it.
Warburton and Price play a couple worn out from years and years of marriage (a la "Still Standing" and, to a lesser degree, "Everybody Loves Raymond"). Oliver Hudson and Bianca Kajlich play their frisky friends who have just decided to get married ("Yes, Dear," "How I Met Your Mother" and, through some distant overly-inbred extension of the sitcom family tree, "Friends").
And David Spade -- hey, I thought the guy was hilarious once, but the soul sinks just typing his name -- plays the free agent (Doogie Howser in "Mother," Charlie Sheen in "Two and a Half Men").
With safe punchlines like "In your version of marriage, am I allowed to vote?" and "actually, we've replaced the sex portion of the marriage -- been replaced by Letterman" and "If you wrestle enough bears, sooner or later you're going to get pinned," with the textbook Spade comeback, "What are bears -- fat chicks?", "Rules of Engagement" is beholden to a rulebook of CBS's making.
And you know what? Good for them. CBS is the most conservative network in TV these days, churning out crime drama after sitcom after crime drama. It's what they do best, and it's why they are the No. 1 network in all the land. Sooner or later, the network's aversion to risk taking is going to catch up to it. It always does. I can hardly begrudge CBS for putting on this show, which is as much a brand extension as Coke Zero -- distinctive, I guess, but when you get right down to it, a market-driven redundancy.
But if all networks behaved this way, I would be in trouble. I'd be bored out of a job.
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