If Walt Disney was still alive--in other words, if that whole cryogenic thing worked out--and he had purchased the ABC TV network, just like the Walt Disney Co. did without him, I'm sure that when some producer pitched him a show called Cougar Town, visions of cute little cougar cubs cavorting in a wildlife setting would have gotten an immediate thumbs up from him. Courtney Cox as an over-the-hill and horribly over-the-top horny divorcee on the prowl for young studs would have put him back in the freezer.
The new show--produced by Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence--is so incredibly bad that I was amazed it even made it on the air. Scrubs has been dying a slow, painful death over the past few years (amazingly ABC still has it on life support, with a return from its own cryogenic freezer sometime soon). Everything that made it great--its originality, its off-the-wall characters, its penchant for flying off on wild tangents--started to grate after around season five or so. Cougar Town grates from episode one. Cox, who is also a producer on the show, is so obnoxiously out there as a real estate agent trying to cope with her age and what she fears is her fading sexual appeal (truth be told, she looks great, except she looks like she may have collagened her lips, a stunt she makes fun of during the first episode). Her ex-husband is a cartoon, her friends are cartoons, only her poor high school age son seems relatively normal. And speaking of that son...the comment by mom about his penis was the epitome of creepy. It's okay for mom to be a hot MILF type, only not with her son. Or an eighth grader who steals all her sexy real estate signs around town. Or the young boy on the bicycle she flashes. Eew. Walt, are you still spinning?
And then there's her neighbor, played by Christa Miller, who happens to be producer Bill Lawrence's wife. Christa, what happened to you? You were so wonderful on The Drew Carey Show as the gal pal of the guys. Now you're the poster child for what not to do with plastic surgery. Seriously, it's your face, you can do what you want, but there's something radically wrong here, so smooth, so...well, where's the left corner of your mouth? Where did that go? But I digress...
I watched all of Cougar Town. Cox was likable at one point on Friends, neurotic, sweet, quirky and real, so I almost felt I owed her enough to at least give her new show a chance. But here she's just shrill and hammy. I only made it through 10 minutes of the other new ABC comedy series premiere last night, Modern Family. I like Ed O'Neill and Julie Bowen, but I hated this show. It's getting some decent reviews, but I found it unwatchable. Another bunch of cartoon characters with nary a sympathetic person in the bunch. That's the one thing missing from a lot of the sit-coms on TV these days: There's no one to like. They're all so caustic and conniving and cartoonish. I'm using that word a lot. Watch both these shows next week on ABC and you'll see what I mean. If anything, they keep the Disney cartoon legacy alive, but not in a way Walt would appreciate.
