TV Review: Sh*t his dad doesn’t say

‘Surviving Jack’ takes all the fun out of an already thin concept

Justin Halpern keeps coming up with new ways to profit from his father’s personality. In 2009, he started @shitmydadsays, a Twitter page devoted to his curmudgeonly dad’s humorous truth-telling that has amassed more than 3 million followers. Based on the success of the Twitter page, Halpern was able to expand the concept into a book, a feather-light memoir of the same name peppered with dozens of priceless quotes from his eternally put-upon Pops.

Halpern himself is not particularly interesting and the memoir-ish bits of the book feel like little more than context in preparation for the next joke. Still, “Sh*t My Dad Says” reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Halpern quickly sold the concept to CBS, and soon “$#*! [pronounced “Bleep”] My Dad Says” was a primetime sitcom starring William Shatner. After 18 lackluster episodes, the show was put out of its misery and canceled.

Halpern then wrote a sequel to “Sh*t My Dad Says” called “I Suck at Girls,” a slight, amusing catalogue of the author’s relationship failures from childhood to present day, with Father Halpern occasionally appearing to offer profane pearls of wisdom on sex and dating (e.g. “Life is f*cking long, especially if you’re stupid”).

Dad’s charm and humor come from his word choice. His blunt observations wouldn’t have the same impact without the excessive profanity and sometimes-bizarre analogies, which may be why “Surviving Jack” seems so labored and laugh-less. The new Fox sitcom, loosely based on “I Suck at Girls,” suffers from the family-friendly demands of primetime, meaning quotes like “Sometimes life leaves a hundred dollar bill on your dresser, and you don’t realize until later that it’s because it f*cked you,” are nowhere to be found.

As co-creator of the series, Justin Halpern has happily bastardized his childhood in service of the sitcom format. Sam Halpern is now Jack Dunlevy, a pathologically gruff oncologist played by Christopher Meloni (“Law & Order: SVU”) who becomes a stay-at-home dad when Mom (Rachael Harris) decides to go back to law school. The militant Jack must learn how to interact with his two teenaged children, rebellious Rachel (Claudia Lee) and socially awkward Halpern stand-in Frankie (Connor Buckley). Frankie, a 16 year-old high school freshman, is timid and fearful about everything from girls to driving, so dad teaches him blunt life lessons. And that’s pretty much the extent of it.

Several of Halpern’s anecdotes find their way into the pilot episode that aired March 27, including one of the book’s funnier passages in which Frankie and his friends steal a hobo’s porn stash and then bury it in the back yard. Pointlessly, the show is set in 1991(when Halpern was ten years old), and the soundtrack is wall-to-wall with the disposable radio hits of the era.

Meloni is funny and committed as Jack, and Harris possesses a light touch, but Buckley’s awkwardness extends beyond his character. As the show’s anchor and narrator, Frankie is passive and inert, appearing as little more than a lightning rod for embarrassment—a punching bag for his classmates and sounding board for his father. Again, Halpern himself was always the least interesting part of this whole enterprise, but with a team of writers and artistic license, it shouldn’t be so difficult to cast a likeably awkward foil for Jack.

As a mid-season replacement, Fox ordered only eight episodes. The series may get better and may find an audience yet (the pilot’s ratings were soft), but with father’s wry observations neutered and son rendered an unremarkable bore, it should surprise no one when “Jack” doesn’t survive.