Sit Down, Shut Up: Pilot (series premiere)

Sit Down, Shut Up (series premiere)

Here is the new cartoon member “Sit Down, Shut Up”. This show depicts the lives and quirks of nine staffers at a high school in a small fishing town. This series shows that teachers have lives and personal problems too.

EP 1.1 Pilot

We are introduced to a group of teachers and staff at an elementary school and learn what really happens when the students go home. Knob Haven High School is facing a financial crisis and Acting Principal Sue Sezno has to either win a future football game in order to obtain donations from alumni or fire a faculty member. Meanwhile, Vice Principal Stuart Proszakian becomes addicted to pills that were confiscated from a student’s locker.

The problem with Fox's "Sit Down, Shut Up" isn't that it tries to be a meta-comedy that pokes fun at other animated series, riffing on characters' desire for catchphrases, the bleeping of dialogue and the challenge of being "hard to market." No, the problem is that the show just isn't funny.

It's one thing to make sly nods in the viewer's direction; it's another entirely to stock a series with characters named Miracle Grohe and Sue Sezno and expect people not to wince every time those heavy-handed puns slam home.

Writer and executive producer Mitchell Hurwitz is in the unenviable position of trying to follow his dazzling success with "Arrested Development," one of the best TV comedies in history. But that show had the benefit of stronger writing, editing and onscreen chemistry among the leads, and though it's possible to tighten punch lines or transitions over time, the characters on "Sit Down" will never resonate as anything other than caricatures -- crude placeholders for actual comedians.

Mixing animated protagonists with live-action backdrops, the series feels loose and undefined, like a moderately amusing short that inexplicably has been turned into a show.

"Sit Down" -- based on a short-lived (and fully live-action) Australian sitcom from 2000 -- revolves around the faculty and staff of Knob Haven High School, most of whom blandly dislike the students and spend their days caught up in their own problems: The coach has a crush on the science teacher, the drama teacher is bisexual, the German teacher is homeless and hooked on porn, etc. Jason Bateman voices the coach, Larry Littlejunk, whose name is funny once if you're 17, funny twice if you're high and lamented by anyone wanting to see real comedy.

The entire series is that overt. Every joke is telegraphed a mile off or just plain flat, especially the attempts to break the fourth wall. For instance, Larry reminisces about a time Miracle (Kristin Chenoweth) went topless, and he repeatedly asks for a flashback.

Among major cast members, only Will Forte ("Saturday Night Live") manages to land a couple of actual laughs. His delivery breaks through the dully drawn scenes and uninvolving characters, if only for a moment.