 It's All Relative (ABC) Uh-oh! These familes are like oil and water … they shouldn't mix! Hopefully, they can all learn to appreciate each other's differences and live together in mutual tolerance! Yuck. What has television come to? This show seems to think it has an "opinionated" Archie Bunker in the character of the conservative, bartender dad, as well as a "principled" Will from Will & Grace in his opposite, the liberal, art-gallery owning gay dad. What made those characters work is that they were not trying to be previously-established TV characters. These carbon copies don't even work as stereotypes. Throw in a mischievous sister and a bunch of other half-heartedly drawn sidekicks, and there you have it. A big messy pie-fight aimed at diametrically opposed audiences, succeeding only in hitting itself. The episode I saw entailed the two families rallying around the same political candidate for different reasons. The candidate ends up being suspiciously Kennedy-esque (of course; they never make political characters Nader-esque, or Hoover-esque) … he gets drunk at a fundraiser and ends up running over a goose in a paddle-boat. The straight dad and the gay dad then have to go bury the goose, Sopranos-style, so as not to compromise the guy's campaign. Of course, a couple of hours shoveling together and they've come to a deeper understanding of each other's humanity. Meanwhile, the network was also shoveling: that is, shoveling shit down my throat. Incoherent, banal, misguided, and as half-assed a sitcom as has ever been made, It's All Relative is a sensitivity-training experiment gone wrong. I came away simply hating all people, gay and straight alike, but especially television executives.
Review by God's Messenger © 2003 |