I’m including this clip from Go, because even though it came out 13 years ago, it sums up my feelings on Family Circus. Time has not been kind to The Family Circus, mainly because The Family Circus was always terrible. I hated it when I was six, I hated it when I was 16, and I’ll hate it when I’m 66. It sucks. It lacks even the basic clever gimmick of Garfield or Marmaduke. It consists solely of lazy illustrations of lazy germs of lazy sitcom jokes, a moron’s tweets before Twitter. Liking The Family Circus is one of the 12 early warning signs of mental retardation according to the American Journal of Science. A few years back, I used
Fox and Walden Media are running away with “Family Circus,” hiring the writing team of Nichole Millard and Kathryn Price to adapt the comicstrip as a live action project.
“Family Circus” has been in development since 2010, when Fox and Walden picked up the feature rights and set up the project with Jon Baldecchi and Stacy Maes.
Bil Keane debuted the comicstrip in 1960 that was based on his own family. In recent years, the strip has been drawn by Bill’s son Jeff Keane.
Millard and Price just sold the “Grievances” series pitch to ABC as a look at the co-dependent friendship between a single woman and happily married mother of three, who start their own law firm after being screwed over by their male bosses.
Their first feature film was Disney’s “The Game Plan,” and they are currently adapting the young adult novel “Fallen” for Mayhem Pictures and Inferno.
It could be good, who knows, all they have to work with is a generic family and a series of haircuts. I don’t pretend to know what magic these artists could weave from those threads. What I do know is that you could freeze one of your own turds and draw a stick figure with it and it would easily be a better starting premise than Family Circus.
I’ve always assumed Family Circus wasn’t a comic strip, it was a puzzle, which is why they put it down at the bottom with the crossword and sodoku. If you can read more than two of them without jamming a pencil in your eye, you win.