Run of the House

my rating:

Living in Grand Rapids MI - a mid-sized city in the midwest, famous for pretty much nothing except Jerry Ford - one develops something of an inferiority complex about it. So when the movie American Pie - set in a fictionalised version of East Grand Rapids High School, just down the street - was released, I had to go see it.

Likewise, when I heard that the new WB sitcom Run of the House is supposed to be set in Grand Rapids, I figured I should take a look. One look was enough.

The gimmick of the show is that Mom & Dad have moved to Arizona for his health (never mind that most of the year the climate here is fairly innocuous, and even feeble senior citizens here who buy condos in sunny Arizona usually only spend a few months a year there), leaving the three older siblings in charge of their 15-year-old sister. But of course they don't have enough parenting skills among the three of them to do the job right. Hilarity ensues.

Or not. One of the better theories of comedy that I've heard is that things are funny when they defy our expectations. "Take my wife... please!" is funny because we think he's saying one thing, but it turns out he's saying something else. Run of the House, on the other hand, is predictable.

Like in the episode I watched, when the youngest sister throws a party, and the two middle siblings conspire to keep it a secret from the oldest brother. You know that the party's going to get out of hand, that the brother's going to find out about it, and that the episode will end with the sibs loyally trying to protect each other from being blamed for it. No surprise; no comedy.

It also loses bunches of credibility points by having the characters talk only about having enough soda and chips for the crowd. For one thing, we call it "pop" around here, not "soda". For another, you damn well know that there's going to be alcohol at an open, unsupervised high school party (even in Grand Rapids, American Pie at least got that right), and they showed people carrying red and blue plastic SOLO cups around, but nobody even mentions the fact that parties like this can have consequences beyond broken coffee tables and plugged toilets.

As for the setting, it was indistinguishable from any other suburban American sitcom. The obligatory wacky next-door neighbor shouts "Thank you, Grand Rapids!" at the end of a karaoke performance, and makes a reference to her husband going rabbit hunting "in the UP" (which is at least the proper Michigander term for the Upper Peninsula, though I've never heard of anyone going there - or anywhere else in the state - to hunt rabbits).

I've certainly endured worse half-hours sitting in front of a TV, but this is a reminder of why I don't do much sitcom-watching at all these days (with only Scrubs, Malcolm in the Middle, and The Simpsons left on my weekly viewing schedule from last year, and nothing new so far this year to add to it).