Before Michael Cera and “The Big Bang Theory,” Steve Urkel made it cool to be a geek. And not just an uber-geek but a mega-geek, someone so unashamed to be himself that he was hip, and we loved him. I won’t deny it. When I was a kid watching this series, everyone including me loved Urkel, and we thought of him as the supreme nerd to idolize even prompting the Urkel Dance to be imitated over and over. As I’ve said before: kids are stupid and we were. Watching “Family Matters” many years later, it was interesting to see the evolution of this series that started out its life in “Perfect Strangers.”
While the show does begin as a sort of new age “The Cosby Show” with a middle class, honest, loving African American family, its premiere on TGIF on the ABC network here in America was pretty boring. And I think after a while even ABC began to realize that deep down this was just a lackluster and forgettable retread of “The Cosby Show” that tried its best to muster up interesting characters and storylines and bombed big time.
I think the more the series goes on the more it begins to feel like a clever sitcom from the BBC because when you see season two you can see all the pieces finally coming together. All the awkwardness and flaws from season one are practically gone and more intelligent humor is implemented to make this one of the smarter comedy series on television.
Maybe it’s because I’m just plain sick of vampires or maybe it’s just that I want them to go back to being feral vicious monsters but “True Blood” always bordered on “Twilight” for me to properly enjoy it and as hard as I wanted to enjoy it, I just couldn’t come around toward liking it as much as my family who found the show to be a breath of fresh air. Sure, the ad campaign was genius, but that’s just about where we end it.
It was probably a god send that “Legion” was cancelled, because three seasons in, the series was making very little progress in the way of storylines. With the constantly shuffling characters, and tonal changes, “Legion” could never really decide what it wanted from audiences, and the addition of Chameleon Boy shows that. His sudden introduction in Season Three with his smart ass personality left the show feeling painfully uneven as most of the characters felt very self aware and stern while Chameleon was often spouting one liners and nothing else.
“The Big Bang Theory” had every chance to fail. It was a forgettable premise, a formula concept and really didn’t look to offer up anything new. And yet it ended up being really good and addictive. I watched the pilot when it premiered and stuck with it because in spite of the broad comedy, cheesy gimmick, and pretty exhausting pop culture references, it’s an amusing and charming sitcom with some good laughs in store if you want to give it a chance.