Posted by Mr.Kotter at hmhost.horacemann.com on May 31, 2000 at 10:58:38:
Are these critics talking about the same Clerks TCS that we are waiting to see....I say fuck em! fuck hard.......This from the USA Today:
There is also a sidebar interview with KS...pretty much old hat....Why are people so down on this show...It is like they are setting it up to fail before it ever airs......
Summertime, and oblivion's easy.
It's hot, and people are either outside or off
on vacation - a combination that encourages
the networks to dump shows into the summer
that they either forgot they owned or are
hoping we'll forget they aired. It's the TV
version of the summertime blues, as a schedule made up of repeats and
losers leads to low ratings, leading in turn to more losers.
Not always, of course. Every summer, the networks use the reduced
competition and lowered expectations to try out a few original ideas, as
ABC did with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and CBS is doing tonight
with Survivor (though the network's refusal to make the show available for
review is hardly a vote of confidence).
Still, most of the new episodes you'll see
this summer are being burned off - from
next week's return of NBC's Veronica's
Closet and Suddenly Susan to tonight's
premiere of ABC's cartoon comedy
Clerks. If you doubt that dumping is
Clerks' fate, ask creator Kevin Smith, who
has been vigorously complaining about the
network's behavior.
He should send ABC a thank-you note. If
he's lucky, no one will notice this sitcom slacker, and he can get on with his
film career.
Though ABC is promoting Clerks as a continuation of Smith's low-budget
1994 feature, the show apparently owes more to the movie's comic-book
spinoff. Where the movie was mostly talk, the show is full of exaggerated
comic escapades that send the boys soaring in helicopters or scrambling to
escape the Quick Stop freezer.
The clerks are Dante and Randal (Brian O'Halloran and Jeff Anderson,
repeating their film roles), underachievers who hang with Jay and Silent Bob
(Jason Mewes and Smith, also from the film). Tonight, they switch jobs and
end up in court - an excuse for a series of pop culture riffs that are either too
common or too late - or, in the case of Star Wars, both.
If the test for Smith was whether he could make his characters seem funny
without the film's obscenity, he has failed. The characters are too shallow to
carry a weekly series, particularly one that seems to have been dashed off
overnight.
Tonight's episode was actually meant to be the
show's fourth, but ABC is running them out of
order. Either the network assumes you won't
notice, or it figures the show won't last long enough
for the mix-up to matter.
Even in the summer, some shows get dumped harder than others.