Cul de Sac by Richard Thompson for September 16, 2010

Kevin has planted a seed of doubt…

Dysfunction at its best. I love it.

She’s thinking about it…..

Marcus is weird. Alice is suggestible. Kevin is a boy.

Yeah, well my mother’s a car … oh, sorry, that was Jerry Van Dyke.

CDWARD As bad as TV is, it will never again sink to that depth, I hope.

I think it would be so cool to have a Martian Grandma!

I thought women were Venetian.

No, cleo dear we’re not all blind.

iamtxmilady: that’s the best line of the year.

marcus always makes me lol, can’t wait until he meets loris

I want to see them do a bigscreen remake of “My Mother the Car”, just for kicks. I’m a firm believer that there’s no such thing as a concept so awful that it can’t be turned into something fun with the right execution. At some point along the line, surely a fair number of people THOUGHT it could be a funny show.

The TV show was pulled after only one episode, and it’s become such a byword for “Bad TV” that there’s no way that most people who trash it now have ever seen it. It couldn’t have been much worse as a comedy than “Knight Rider” was as a drama.

My standard for “Bad TV” was set, I think, by “My Two Dads.” Think about it - the mother was sleeping with two guys at the same time, and didn’t know which fathered her daughter. That’s not TOO bad, but how far can you push it before it’s queasy-making? Four Dads? Seven? “My Dads, the 1985 Super Bowl Champion Chicago Bears”? Obviously, the more Dads, the more Comedy Gold, right?

Kevin’s Mom needs to start his medication again.

Fritzoid: Cartman’s Mom. The 1989 Denver Broncos.

(In fairness, that whole story was pretty quease-inducing, if you take it without the satire.)

I love Cul De Sac. I think it’s probably THE best comic strip out there. Even better than Calvin and Hobbes (if that’s possible) and WAY better than Peanuts!

@cdward - My brother’s a star! - oh wait, Jerry Van bleeep again.

This comment board automatically replaced the word bleeep with bleeep - I am insulted that it thinks I would insult Lesbians that way. I was just making a little joke! Actually, I do appreciate their attempt to prevent homophobic comments.

@ fritzoid: While we’re on the subject of TV shows being made into big movie remakes, here’s a list of others, all of them Saturday morning classics:

H. R. Puffinstuff The Banana Splits Speed Buggy Wonder Bug ARK II Captain Caveman & The Teen Angels Space Academy

Josh, I hope they do better jobs than they did with “Land of the Lost”. So maybe the original show was kind of cheesy (when I watched it as a kid I certainly didn’t think so), but it could have made a GREAT “Kid’s Adventure” film if they’d done it straight. Instead, they turned it into a goofball Will Farrell vehicle…

“Space Academy”, certainly, I could see as having potential.

In the interests of full disclosure, I must admit that I was a fan of “Cop Rock.” But it lived and died by the quality of its songs, and while the first episode had songs written by Randy Newman, the tunes for subsequent episodes were by lesser songwriters. If you enjoyed the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” episode Once More With Feeling, you’ve got no business trashing “Cop Rock” as misguided (but perhaps it was ahead of its time)…

Also, if you stripped away the songs, you were nonetheless left with a really good Steven Bochco cop show (at least it STARTED promisingly).

Actually, I meant what I said, but what I said was founded on error. I was under the impression that it HAD been yanked before the second episode.

Oh well… I stand by the principle, anyway.

One thing I like about British TV is that, if you’ve got an idea for a show that would be really funny for 6 episodes, you can make those 6 episodes without having to worry about milking it after the comedic udder has dried up. If it’s successful, and it takes a couple more years to come up with ideas for 6 more episodes, you can do that, too. There was a BBC show called “Black Books” that I really like, and they did three series of it (2000, 2002, and 2004), but each series is only 6 episodes (18 total). If they tried that here, they would have had to pad it out to 26 episodes (or however many) just to get one full season.

I’ve got a couple of ideas for sitcoms that I think would be really fun for 4 to 6 episodes, but their comedic potential would probably be exhausted if they went beyond that…

“How bad could a mother being a car be!”

How bad could a show about a talking horse be!

How bad could a show about an astronaut who finds a genie be!

How bad could a show about nothing be!

And so on… :-)

Again, it’s the execution that matters, not the concept. Heck, George and Jerry’s show about the guy who’s sentenced to be another guy’s butler might have been hilarious, if the scripts were funny…

Actually, MMtC wasn’t all that bad if you were a fan of Ann Sothern or Avery Scheiber, (or Sonny Tufts, for that matter). Heck, I was just a kid. What did I know about taste?

Sisyphos said, “Marcus is weird. Alice is suggestible. Kevin is a boy.”

…and Sisyphos hit the nail on the head! LOL!

I hope none of my grandkids thinks I am THAT wierd! But everyone knows I’m quirky;-)

iamtxmilady very good reply on your part.

Wait… Why are we talking about TV again?