Men Behaving Badly

When a show stars Rob Schneider it’s hard to find anything worse to say about it. If you don’t remember, MBB featured guys acting like moronic jerks, drinking tons of booze, burping as loudly as they could and being led around like a dog on a leash every time a set of boobs appeared. You know who liked this show? Stupid men whose psychological development stopped in third grade and women who don’t like men very much because they’ve met too many guys like that. Everyone else wasn’t watching and NBC unceremoniously cancelled the show after a few episodes of the second season.

The King of Queens

It’s high time someone made a TV show about a fat moron with a saucy wife. Oh wait, they’ve been doing that since I Love Lucy and it never gets any funnier. When not even the presence of Jerry Stiller and Patton Oswalt can do anything to save your show, that’s a sign that it’s really, really insufferably bad. Fun fact: This was the last show to begin in the 90s to remain on television. Really? Yep. It was on for like a million years or something. A million totally stupid years of Kevin James getting into wacky hijinks and trying to hide the fuck up of the week from his wife.

The New Girl

Zooey Deschanel is a bit like that girl with borderline personality disorder you met during your first semester at college. At first you were glad she was hanging around you all the time, making cute faces and riding your junk raw. After a month or two, though, creepy habits like photographing you in your sleep and going through your email got old — to say nothing of her weird habits like keeping her piss in jars. America is going to drop this show like you dropped that girl, except this show won’t show up uninvited and try to stay with you for the next six months.

Whitney

You know what television doesn’t have enough of? Relationship comedies. Or stand-up comedians trying to make the transition to the small screen. So it’s a good thing NBC has brought us this sitcom about a simple gal trying to inject some new romance into her relationship. One thing is certain: in 2011 there’s nothing America loves more than multi-camera comedies with a laugh track. This one is clearly going to go far.

The Playboy Club

Mad Men might be the hottest show on television today. The big three are rushing to copy it, with Pan-Am (which is a crapshoot) and The Playboy Club, which is dead in the water. You know what was awesome about the real Playboy Clubs of the 1960s? Dudes like Don Draper taking bunnies into the cloak room for a quickie right before forgetting their name. This show would work like gangbusters if it were on HBO or Showtime. On NBC it might be hip, but it certainly won’t be sexy.

David Hornsby created and stars in the new fall comedy How to Be a Gentleman. Based on the book by John Bridges and the lost art of chivalry, Hornsby plays Andrew, a men’s magazine writer obsessed with being a gentleman. He meets Burt (Kevin Dillon), a personal trainer who wants to toughen him up.

Now if being a gentleman is funny in a fish out of water way, how does Andrew function in a world where guys read The Game and practice The Mystery Method?  “Burt’s the kind of guy that would have The Game or have his own sort of game system,” Hornsby said after a Television Critics Association panel on Gentleman. “The gentleman’s game is just being a mannered respectful person. I think that’s where the two worlds collide. You have Burt dragging Andrew to a bar to pick up women. Giving a line to a woman can be a very tacky situation. So Burt has his own angle in to pick up women whereas Andrew tries to find the higher road.”

The fact that The Game and pick-up artist methods are effective flies in the face of gentlemanly behavior. Hornsby would stand by gentlemen’s methods. “Well, a gentleman can succeed in his own way in picking up women. Those techniques are used by a certain type of person. I don’t think it’s quite the gentlemanly thing to do. Yes, they do smack the face.”

Full disclosure, former Screen Junkies editor Patrick Schumacker is writing on How to Be a Gentleman with his $#*! My Dad Says collaborator Justin Halpern. Hornsby is glad to have them on board, particularly for the details of how a men’s magazine operates.

“They really have funny, unique voices. It’s great to have them on the show. They worked at Maxim literally so they’re sort of like the physicists that The Big Bang has, we have Justin and Patrick.”

How to Be a Gentleman comes to CBS this fall.

Let’s start with the funny — or at least the shows attempting to be funny. Every season networks churn out a batch of new comedy series hoping for the next great sitcom, and this year has so many, we split them into two categories: Guys and Gals. Here are the shows with guys trying to be men.

WATCH IT:

“Man Up” (ABC), Premieres Tuesday, 10/18 at 8:30 pm

Dan Fogler is a poor man’s Jack Black and can provide laughs in the right setting. This seems like a show certainly suited to his brand of humor. Mather Zickel and Teri Polo also star and Polo’s addition to the cast is particularly encouraging because she perfected the ‘straight woman’ role in the Meet the Parents movies, something that should serve her well in this series. The long and short is this show embodies what this whole category is about: guys trying to be men. Specifically, these guys are trying to figure out what it means to be a man while navigating their boring jobs, fatherhood, life in a metrosexual world…and hours spent playing video games.

To be honest, the batch of guy comedies this year are pretty weak. Man Up may not be destined to be an all-time classic, but it has enough laughs and potential to keep us from turning to our Carrot Top DVD collection for entertainment. Seeing these guys may also make you feel better about your own life. Except their wives and girlfriends are way hotter than yours, so probably not.

SKIP IT:

“Last Man Standing” (ABC), Premieres Tuesday, 10/11 at 8 pm (ET)

Oh, Tim Allen. We barely liked this show back when it was called Home Improvement, and we’re not going to like it now. I guess at least this time he mixed it up by giving himself daughters (those kids in Home Improvement were boys, right?). This show is Tim Allen doing what he does, except the big spin here is…wait for it…his world is dominated by women and all things female.

Hector Elizondo is on the show and he’s always good, and Nancy Travis is pleasant to watch, but pleasant doesn’t make funny and Tim Allen certainly doesn’t make funny, either. This is TV rehashing at its finest/worst. Avoid it.

THE REST:

“How to be a Gentleman” (CBS), Premieres Thursday, 9/29 at 8:30 pm

Kevin Dillon goes from playing Johnny Drama on “Entourage” to playing Johnny Drama on this show. Well, his character isn’t named Johnny Drama, but that’s essentially the character he’s playing. Rhys Darby and Dave Foley are in the cast, too, and always funny. CBS has struck gold with this sitcom formula before, and while it’s not my cup of tea, there’s a chance this one will last a season or two.

“Free Agents” (NBC), Premieres Wednesday, 9/14 at 10:30 pm

I’m big fan of Hank Azaria, but when he is carrying a project as the leading man, it never seems to work (i.e., the disaster that was “Huff”). This is a remake of a British show set in a talent agency and centers around Azaria and Kathryn Hahn as they try and maintain a working relationship after a one-night stand. Seriously. That’s the brilliant set up behind this future cancellation.