Review – Hank
Hank – ABC – 8:00/7:00pm Wednesday – USA
I’ve long lamented the death of the sitcom. Gone are the days of laugh tracks and rooms with no front wall. CBS is the only station still giving the traditional sitcom a red hot go, but even their best show (How I Met Your Mother, obviously) messes around with the conventions of the genre. ABC on the other hand has opted for a steady stream of single camera comedies with varying degrees of success.
From dregs like Cavemen to the almost there Carpoolers and Samantha Who? all the way up to the just plain great Better Off Ted the laugh track has had no place within the walls of ABC. So it’s somewhat surprising that ABC are the ones to give us Hank, a traditional sitcom which quickly reminds us that sometimes ‘traditional’ is just another word for ‘old’.
Kelsey Grammer, a man long associated with the sitcom as we once knew it, stars as Hank Pryor, a onetime high flying executive who lost his job, his home, his everything and has been forced to move with his family back to little ol’ Virginia. Hank has a wife named Tilly, played by Melinda McGraw. Hank & Tilly are supposed high school sweethearts but the difference in age between McGraw and Grammer suggests that maybe as a senior Hank had a thing for freshman.
Tilly & Hank bring with them a pair of bratty child actors pretending to be their children. Rounding out the cast is David Koechner from Anchorman playing the same loud mouth he plays in everything only this time he’s named Uncle Grady. Uncle Grady is always dropping in uninvited and getting on Hank’s nerves. Everything about Hank from the premise to the overacting to the wacky in-law screams ‘the 90’s.’
After the groan inducing Back To You you wouldn’t have thought things could get any worse for Grammer but he’s managed to find himself a real bottom dweller with this show. Grammer doesn’t even save himself through his acting, which isn’t so much acting as blustering from scene to scene in a performance that can only be described as ‘Kelsey Grammer-ish’.
As the pilot wound on Hank learnt some very valuable lessons about family. After seeing how crazy Uncle Grady can connect with Hank’s kids even though Hank struggles, Hank decides to make the effort to get to know them better. Hank’s first mission, in all seriousness, is to learn how to, how you say, HANG OUT. Is Hank supposed to be an alien or something? Has he never met his family before? Why doesn’t he know how to hang out? Are future episodes going to involve him struggling with the concept of milk and high fives and that terrifying little beast everybody calls ‘cat’?
Hank’s biggest crime isn’t just that it feels like a show that should have aired after Home Improvement years ago, but even by mid-90’s generic sitcom standards Hank is incredibly boring. Hank is one of those bizarre instances where the show would work better as a single camera comedy for the sole reason that we wouldn’t have the laugh track reminding us every thirty seconds just how unfunny it really is.
Grammer tries his hardest but ultimately Hank is a complete let down, especially alongside the rest of ABC’s Comedy Wednesday line up of the much better Modern Family, The Middle and yes, even Cougar Town (each one a single camera comedy with no laugh track.) I hope in the end Hank has taught us all the valuable lesson that the sitcom really is dead, and that maybe this time it should stay that way.
Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Ugly
