It has been over nine years since Chris Farley's death and David Spade is still working. What a country!
Seriously, though, Spade has been taking some frustrating roles since his work with his late sidekick. Spade's comic persona - a wry, sarcastic, smirking, smarmy loser - worked fairly well in his movies with Farley because Spade served as a straight man to Farley's antics.
Certainly Spade himself was funny, but it was mostly in his responses to what the fat man did and said. Now Spade is still trying to sell that character on its own merits, and it still won't be funny as long as Spade thinks it can work alone.
This brings us to "Rules of Engagement," a show that bears more than fleeting resemblance to an unholy union between "'Til Death" and "How I Met Your Mother." David Spade is a 40-year-old happy bachelor sleazebag, cruising for a different woman every night. He has four friends in two couples: one has been married for 12 years and one is engaged. If the show sounds so boring that you wonder how it got approved, it's because it is just middle-of-the-road enough to be a sound investment for CBS.
Within the married couple we have the talents of Patrick Warburton. It's been a while since we've seen his face, but it served as a nice reminder that the only thing better than Patrick Warburton the voice actor is Patrick Warburton the live-action actor. His deadpan is nearly peerless and his timing is solid. That said, he is not given nearly enough to work with - we're not talking "Seinfeld" here.
Most of Warburton's jokes are about how - surprise! - once you get married, your sex life suffers. The engaged couple, on the other hand, has plenty of sex, but they're worried about their upcoming marriage. David Spade gets lucky all the time, but he's wondering: is there more to life?
If we return to one of the earliest male-centric sitcoms about marriage, "The Honeymooners," we certainly see some easy jokes about unhappily married couples. What that show did, however, that "Rules" doesn't, is give the characters lives outside their sex lives. The writers were able to tell a story about marriage that takes the cheapest shots possible and still have, to some extent, complex, three-dimensional characters.
Though it's not really a fair comparison, we can also look to Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz's sitcom work. Lucy and Ricky were fairly young, married and eventually had a young child. Their friends, Fred and Ethel, had been married forever.
The setup bears plenty of resemblance to "Rules." However, the show managed to develop dozens of plots relating to each individual character. They were, to beat a dead horse, individual people outside of their marriages.
Maybe it's the time in which we live that's to blame. Perhaps we define ourselves too much by our sexuality and "Rules" is merely a reflection of that element of our culture. Still, "Rules" doesn't seem to be trying to do anything original, and originality would be their only salvation, considering that the show is not funny. All the characters are white and heterosexual. When networks make shows like this, they are trying to tell us that these men are Everymen and these women are Everywomen, but it is increasingly difficult to find a group of friends that is so heterogeneous and insulated.
"Rules of Engagement" offers nothing that is worth anyone's time. Its jokes are played out like Monica Lewinsky limericks. Its set pieces are all dull clich?©s. Ultimately, "Rules" offers nothing of substance. Keep drilling, CBS - maybe you'll hit comedy soon.
