TV: Shit My Dad Says (CBS, Thu 8:30)

I'm sorry, I refuse to be bothered memorizing the string of characters that CBS wants to use because they think that American sensibilities are too sensitive to be exposed to the word "shit" on a regular basis. If I thought that the show were going to be around for years, I might bother, but this show is so wretchedly awful that if there is any justice in the world, it'll be gone by Thanksgiving.

This one is based on a popular Twitter feed in which a guy posts all the lovably cranky and eccentric things his father says. That might be amusing in 140-character bursts, I suppose, but as the basis of a series, it doesn't work. William Shatner (playing "my dad") is forced to speak entirely in tweet-sized punchlines, none of which work very well. Oh, there are one or two that get a mild laugh just from shock value or absurdity ("Son, if it looks like manure and smells like manure, it's either Wolf Blitzer or manure."), but there's virtually no actual humor to be found here. There's just Shatner, who might do well in a sitcom that was more carefully constructed around his specific talents and quirky rhythms, but flounders in a show this generic; he hasn't been given a character to play that's any deeper than Grumpy Old Man.

And it's possible to write Grumpy Old Man characters with more depth than this; just think back to Stacy Keach in Titus. (Then think about how much better -- well, less awful, at any rate -- this show would be if Stacy Keach were the star. Or Martin Sheen or Tom Selleck or Harvey Fierstein or any moderately competent actor of an appropriate age. Jesus, you could haul Ernest Borgnine out of the home and he could do a better job of it than Shatner's doing.)

As for the other actors in the show, the less said, the better. Their characters are even thinner than Shatner's, and they exist only to say things that Shatner can respond to with another clumsy zinger, and to look shocked when he does.

Will the show die the quick death that it deserves? Well, it's got a nice comfy timeslot between The Big Bang Theory and CSI: Original Recipe, so it could hang in for a while.

The really scary thing? This is the second version of the pilot, which was reshot when the actor playing Shatner's son was recast. Which means that there exists, somewhere in the world, a version of the show that is even worse than this. The mind boggles.