That's My Bush!

April 4, 2001 8:56 AM

That's My Bush! - Premiers tonight on Comedy Central. From Matt and Trey, the creators of South Park. This is either gonna be really great or reeeeeaaaallllyyy bad.
posted by radio_mookie (23 comments total)

I would be looking forward to it a lot more if they would stop trying to walk the thin line between making fun of people and making fun of old sitcoms. Which is it going to be?
posted by 7sharp11 at 9:06 AM on April 4, 2001

Matt and Trey have always been pretty fair with the politics in South Park. Even as a (more often than not) Bush supporter, I'm looking forward to this. Odd that you said "This is either gonna be really great or reeeeeaaaallllyyy bad." - I've been thinking the same thing.
posted by revbrian at 9:45 AM on April 4, 2001

Sounds vile, cheap and stupid. Another reason not to have cable.
posted by ParisParamus at 10:20 AM on April 4, 2001

Looks good to me. But I don't have cable :)
posted by sonofsamiam at 10:23 AM on April 4, 2001

Sounds vile, cheap and stupid...

God Bless America.
posted by jpoulos at 11:19 AM on April 4, 2001

"Sounds vile, cheap and stupid...

God Bless America."

How do we link this thread to the France one? Just kidding.
posted by ParisParamus at 4:01 PM on April 4, 2001

For the record: it was the latter -- reeeeeaaaallllyyy bad. Did anyone manage to actually watch the whole show?
posted by kindall at 11:19 PM on April 4, 2001

No, I kept switching back and forth between it and Law & Order. It was absolutely horrible. Bottoms may look like Bush, but he doesn't sound or act anything like him. And you can't have a parody of bad sitcoms without some truly smart writing. Apparantly they thought simply taking EVERY aspect of bad sitcoms, including the bad writing, and dumping it into this high concept would be enough. It's not.
posted by aaron at 11:58 PM on April 4, 2001

Well, that was 10 minutes of my life that I'll never get back. Did Comedy Central just give Parker and Stone big bags of money and tell them that whatever they come up with will air sight-unseen?
posted by Sal Amander at 12:09 AM on April 5, 2001

I am five minutes into it, and I haven't laughed at all. Maybe That's Our Bill!, about our former prez's life and times, would work better.
posted by hijinx at 4:15 AM on April 5, 2001

I did, regretfully, manage through the entire show.

What started out as a bad 10 minutes, well frankly, just got worse as we went along. It was absolutely horrible. I felt shame for just watching it, and shame for Trey & Matt for making it. (It was, by the way, as an aside, a good episode of South Park preceding it.)

Some highlights included...
(note: while some might call this a spoiler, its hard to spoil something rotten.)

*An "abortion survivor" which was played by a puppet. The reason? It is an undeveloped 30 year old talking fetus. He claimed there were 2 abortion survivors, him and Cher.

*A pro-lifer. Guess what? Protrayed as an a-typical feminist stereotype. Wow, how original.

*George W Bush running between two dinners, one for his wife whom he promised to have dinner for, and this abortion "uniting" dinner which he was hoping to use as a photo-op. Would a real president do antics like this?

*A neighbor. Where does he live? The shack in the south lawn? (they're going to tear it down to play t-ball) And why is he able to just walk through the door, and why is George W Bush at the main entry area of the White House for most of the show?

*The sassy housekeeper, making references about "it didn't work for Nixon" or "I'm going to go do what your father used to and seperate the whites from the colors." (referring to laundry.... i hope)

*In the end, Laura and George make up and are shown in the bed together. Laura is getting excited as George's advances, but George is confused. She is very aroused, and then that undeveloped fetus pops up in their bed.

All in all, a digusting tromp through bad taste. As Jay Sherman (film critic from a good show that was cancelled) would say, "it stinks." And it does.
posted by benjh at 5:00 AM on April 5, 2001

I watched the whole thing too - atrocious.
posted by revbrian at 5:11 AM on April 5, 2001

I think I like a disgusting tromp much more than a disgusting romp. But you're right. One or two marginally funny lines, but mainly a mess, much more of a travesty of sitcom shibboleths than it was a political satire. I'm not sure when they were writing and producing this, but they have no sense of who Bush really is as President -- for instance, the plot circulating around his "uniter not a divider" persona. That was the campaign, South Park dudes. Since the real Bush is proving as balanced as Fox News ("And now a debate from both sides of this issue, the moderate-conservative side and the radical-conservative side!"), it ends up sounding generic and pointless.

I'm actually not surprised, though, that the WashPost inside-the-Beltway reviewer found it funny. Well, maybe it's a kind of anti-navel-gazing? He did point out a basic flaw: One obvious problem with "Bush" is that it satirizes a kind of situation comedy no longer in style.
posted by dhartung at 7:21 AM on April 5, 2001

The show was, I believe, intentended to be a send-up of Bush using a parody of the sitcom as the vehicle. The problem is, the parody was so dead-on, that it was indistinguishable from the crap it was based on. The plots and supporting characters were taken from every sitcom you've ever watched, as were a lot of the jokes. For every set-up, you knew exactly what would happen, because you saw it on The Brady Bunch, That Girl, I Love Lucy, Alice, Friends, Frasier, Married with Children, Who's the Boss, Diff'rent Strokes, Good Times, etc, etc, etc. There was nothing over the top, no edge, no humor. In a word, it sucked.
posted by plinth at 8:02 AM on April 5, 2001

Hackneyed, clichéd and dumb. Just like Baseketball. Matt & Trey are clearly one trick ponies and should stick to what they do best.
posted by Dreama at 10:15 AM on April 5, 2001

Worst New Sitcom Ever.
posted by Sapphireblue at 12:46 PM on April 5, 2001

Nah, there was that other presidential-themed thing, the Secret Desmond Pfeiffer Diaries or whateverthehell. It was even worse. But this is a close second.
posted by Dreama at 1:00 PM on April 5, 2001

I switched channels after a few minutes. Today, I wondered if I had been too hasty, but apparently I wasn't. That NAMBLA episode of Southpark was even better the second time, though.
posted by gimli at 3:10 PM on April 5, 2001

God I miss Carter Country!
posted by CrazyUncleJoe at 3:47 PM on April 5, 2001

Wow, I didn't think anyone else on Earth remembered Carter Country!
posted by aaron at 9:54 PM on April 5, 2001

Was that the show with the mayor who looked like Jerry Falwell and always said, "Handle it, handle it!" in a high-pitched voice?
posted by gimli at 4:20 PM on April 6, 2001