18 to Life, CBC’s latest sit-com, sounds good if you just hear the premise. (Well, maybe not that good, but at least good enough for proper sit-com hijinx to ensue.) Two 18 year old kids decide to get married, much to the chagrin and disappointment of both sets of parents. Hilarity will supposedly come out of the crazy schemes others will do to keep these two apart, and with the kids realizing the realities of marriage.
And then you watch the show. You cringe, you yawn, and you wonder when the jokes will start. You wonder who’s responsible for how the amount of suck. You truly want to know, because there is the need to have someone to blame.
Can we blame the actors? Not really, because most actors need good material, right? In fact, the actors playing the dads (Alain Goulem and Peter Keleghan) are trying their best to make this work- with a few successes, I have to say. But the kids? The stars, the characters who are the main focus of the show’s plot? They just don’t have the acting chops to make the dialogue work. (And, I might mention, very few actors can truly make wretched dialogue sound good.)
So it’s the writers? Again, even though I’ve been blasting the lack of jokes, the weak dialogue and terrible plots, I’m hesitant to lay full blame on the writers. Who knows what the network and producers demanded of them? Because I feel that something as lousy as the pilot of this episode would never have gotten approved, yet it seems plausible that the network bought something and then worried about it and modified it and meddled with it in an attempt to make it appealing to their family audience... and failed.
The pacing is bad, their reasons for getting married in the first place are lame and since when does being married mean you can not go to a concert with your friends?! (Seriously. Dude breaks plans that have been in place for months because he’s married. Apparently, when you get married you give up those tickets you already paid for and all fun time is over.) The plot and how the characters deal with it is so predictable that even if the situation was comical to begin with you still want to change the channel instead of watching it play out.
The next bit of news is either good, or extremely bad: the CBC has this thing about wasting money, in that it doesn’t want to admit any money has been wasted so instead of cutting their losses and cancelling this sitcom fail, they’ll keep it around for a long time. What’s good about that? Well, it gives the actors, writers, producers- everyone involved in the show, time to settle into their roles and make the show (hopefully) better. I, personally, would rather they just cancel and let another Canadian sitcom have a turn, but if that’s not going to happen I hope that this show at least improves...
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