Still recovering from my appendectomy (a lot of what’s being published on the blog this week was written well in advance), which meant I wasn’t able to do a full review of FOX’s “Dads” in advance of tonight’s premiere. I’ll say that while the Seth MacFarlane brand of humor can translate into live action at times (“Ted”), for the most part there are things that Peter Griffin or Quagmire can get away with saying that Peter Riegert or Martin Mull can’t without seeming really really nasty. And by putting MacFarlane humor into a multi-cam sitcom format, you get the studio audience hooting and cheering their approval whenever one of the dads says something inappropriate, which undercuts the producers’ arguments that they are not necessarily endorsing these things.
The whole thing’s such a mess that FOX wound up running one of the stranger “pay no attention to the critics” ads I’ve ever seen (which Fienberg wrote about at length yesterday) to deal with the harsh advance buzz. Now the thing’s aired, so what did you all think? Did it live up/down to all the negative commentary? Did it seem not worth the fuss? Will you watch again?