Imagine taking a 140 -character tweet about a
cranky 72 -year -old man and trying to stretch
it into a full 21 -minute CBS sitcom. Staring
William Shatner, no less. Right. Welcome to the
Deep Dive, because today we are bringing you
a really fascinating case study for you to just
sort of wrap your head around. Yeah, we're looking
at this massive collision between the rawest,
most unfiltered corners of the internet and the
highly sanitized, brightly lit living rooms of
America. It is such a weird friction point and
our source material for this deep dive is actually
the Wikipedia page for a very specific notoriously
bizarre 2010 CBS sitcom. A show that basically
tried to bridge that massive gap between old
media and new media. Exactly. We are talking
about the show titled, and I have to pronounce
this very carefully, as it officially did for
broadcast, the show was called Bleep My Dad Says.
Though it was written out as dollar sign, hashtag,
asterisk, exclamation point. Yeah, dollar sign,
hashtag, asterisk, exclamation point, my dad
says. Which is a title that perfectly encapsulates
the awkwardness of this entire corporate experiment.
Oh, absolutely. OK, let's unpack this. Because
to really get why this show is such a wild time
capsule, we kind of have to put ourselves back
in the mindset of the television industry in
2010. Let's set the stage for you. So the year
is 2010 and the television landscape is undergoing
this massive, terrifying shift. Terrifying for
the executives anyway. Oh, completely. Broadcast
networks are looking at their aging audiences
and then they're looking at these staggering
completely alien internet numbers. Right, because
social media is suddenly driving the cultural
conversation. Yes. And traditional executives
are absolutely scrambling. I mean, ad revenue
models are starting to look shaky because younger
demographics are just migrating to platforms
like YouTube and Twitter. They weren't watching
multi -camera sitcoms on Thursday nights anymore.
Exactly. So the networks are desperate. They
want to capture that lightning in a bottle, grab
that younger demographic. But they fundamentally
do not understand the mechanics of those platforms.
Well, I'd argue they didn't just misunderstand
the platforms. They misunderstood the appeal
of the content itself. That is a great point.
Which brings us to the source material CBS actually
decided to buy, because this didn't start in
like a traditional writer's room in Burbank.
No, not at all. It started on a Twitter feed
created by a 29 -year -old named Justin Halpern.
He created an account called, well, Shit My Dad
Says. Which was basically observational comedy
in its purest, most distilled form. Yeah, the
premise was just a collection of unsolicited,
highly opinionated, and aggressively politically
incorrect quotes from his 72 -year -old father,
Sam. You have a cranky older man just speaking
his mind entirely devoid of context blasted out
in a hundred But see, this is where I have to
push back on the very concept of this adaptation.
How so? Because reading through the source material,
I'm just struck by the sheer physics of this
decision. Translating a single Twitter feed into
a network sitcom is like trying to build an entire
house out of a few funny bumper stickers. That's
a really good analogy. Right. Bumper stickers
don't have load -bearing walls. Where is the
narrative foundation? How do you stretch a 140
-character punchline into a 21 -minute story
arc week after week? Well, that is the fundamental
structural flaw, isn't it? If you look at the
plot breakdown in the source, you can actually
see the network desperately pouring concrete
to make those bumper stickers hold up a roof.
They were trying so hard. They really were, because
they knew they couldn't just have a man sitting
in a chair shouting tweets for a half hour. They
had to build a narrative machine to generate
the quotes organically. Right. they constructed
this incredibly convoluted meta premise. In the
show, the main character is Henry, who is a struggling
writer and blogger. A blogger in 2010. How incredibly
on the nose. Naturally. And because he can't
afford rent, he is forced to move back in with
his thrice divorced 72 year old father, Ed. OK.
Now, here is where the plot literally mirrors
the real world creation of the show. Henry is
trying to get a job as a writer, but he lacks
good material. Right. He has writer's block or
something. Yeah. And during a job interview with
an eccentric editor, his father, Ed, interrupts
with this completely irrational phone call. And
that bizarre unhinged rant sparks the of the
editor conducting the interview. Wait, wait,
so I'm reading this correctly. The editor basically
hires him to be a stenographer for his own father.
That is the exact mechanism. Henry is ultimately
hired, but the catch is he has to continue living
with Ed. Wow. He is contractually obligated by
his new boss to stay in his childhood home just
to have readily available material from his father's
unsolicited rants. That is the engine of the
show. It is a fictional hostage situation. You
literally have a guy trapped in a house forced
to mine his dad for content. The irony here is
profound. I mean, the writers had to create this
elaborate fictionalized world that justified
the existence of the very tweets the show is
based on. Yeah, they build a sitcom premise about
a guy building a blog about his dad, just so
CBS could broadcast a sitcom based on a guy's
Twitter feed about his dad. It's like a Russian
nesting doll of media formats. It really is.
But because a premise about a guy sitting in
a living room tweeting has zero visual stakes,
the network realized they couldn't just cast,
like, a standard character actor. No, they needed
someone bigger. To make a premise centered entirely
around a cranky dad actually work on screen,
they needed gravity. They needed someone whose
sheer presence could carry 21 minutes of television.
And this is where the project shifted from a
quirky internet novelty to a massive network
priority. Yes. The absolute catalyst for this
show getting off the ground happened in late
February 2010. They cast William Shatner as Dr.
Edison Milford. Ed Goodson III. William Shatner.
Right. The moment Shatner landed the lead role,
it instantly triggered the green light from CBS
to produce the pilot. He was the anchor. He was
the whole show, basically. Surrounding him, you
had Jonathan Sadowsky playing Henry. And as a
quick aside from the source, Sadowsky was actually
a recast. Oh, really? Yeah. The original pilot
featured an actor named Ryan Devlin in the role,
but he was replaced by July. Well, that is a
classic network move when a pilot isn't quite
clicking during testing. If the chemistry is
off, you swap out the straight man to better
serve the star. Makes sense. You also had Will
Sasso playing Henry's brother, Vince, and Nicole
Sullivan playing Vince's wife, Bonnie. Both great
comedic actors. Yeah, and I love this little
detail in the source. Both Sasso and Sullivan
had previously been castmates on the sketch comedy
series, Mad TV. Oh, that's right. So they already
brought an established comedic rhythm to the
supporting cast. Oh, and the character of Sam,
which was the actual name of Justin Halpern's
real father, was originally a character in the
pilot. played by Stephanie Lemelin. Wait, the
dad was originally named Sam in the pilot. No,
sorry, a separate character named Sam. But her
character was completely eliminated and never
appeared in the broadcast pilot or any subsequent
episodes. Got it. So they streamlined the ensemble
to focus entirely on the core family dynamic
orbiting Shatner. Exactly. But let me play devil's
advocate for a second. Looking at this assembly,
you have the original creators. David Cohan and
Max Muchnick, who are legendary, traditional
multi -camera sitcom veterans. Very traditional.
You pair them with Justin Halpern, a guy whose
primary writing credit at the time was a Twitter
account. Right? And then you drop William Shatner,
a legendary classic TV star, right into the middle
of it. So my question is... Was Shatner's casting
a stroke of genius to anchor the show or was
it just desperate stunt casting by these TV veterans
trying to legitimize an Internet novelty for
an older CBS audience? What's fascinating here
is that clash of eras. You have three entirely
different generations and philosophies of media
trying to operate the same vehicle. Yeah, that's
a good way to put it. You have the established
sitcom heavyweights who know the rigid mathematical
timing of a laugh track. You have the raw new
media in creator who thrives on spontaneity.
And you have a traditional television icon known
for his distinct theatrical delivery. It's quite
a mix. It created a bizarre melting pot. It was
less about whether Shatner captured the specific
nuance of the real -life dad from the Twitter
feed and more about the fact that Shatner brings
an undeniable theatrical weight to whatever he
says. That's true. If you need a man to deliver
absurd unsolicited rants and make the audience
believe he means every word without breaking
character, well Shatner can do that. Okay, so
they have the star attached. They have the internet
premise locked and loaded into a traditional
sitcom format. The million dollar question is,
what kind of stories did they actually tell?
That's where it gets messy. How do they try to
fuse the edgy, unfiltered nature of the internet
with the cozy, brightly lit format of a network
sitcom? This is where we see the bumpers of that
network television format really start to box
in the wildness of the Internet premise. They
were trying to serve two completely different
masters and the seams began to show almost immediately.
I was looking through the specific episode plots
in the source and the whiplash is incredible.
I'm going to read a few of these because they
perfectly illustrate how they tried and arguably
failed to mix these two tones. Go for it. Let's
look at episode two, titled Why Fight? In this
episode, Ed forbids Henry from getting an internet
connection for the house. OK, which is a very
classic, quaint, grumpy old man sitcom trope.
Exactly. But simultaneously in that same episode,
Ed, who is a doctor, is being asked to diagnose
a rash on his daughter -in -law Bonnie's breast.
Wow. Yeah, so it's this jarring juxtaposition.
You have a very gentle 1980s -style sitcom misunderstanding
paired with an attempt at edgy, push -the -envelope
physical comedy that you might expect from, like
a premium cable show. Right. Then you have episode
seven, Dog Ed Pursuit. Ed finds himself deeply
emotionally attached to a dog named Root Beer.
Heartwarming, simple, family -friendly. Sure.
But that storyline is just opposed against Henry
having very rough sex with Vince and Bonnie's
supervisor. Again, you can practically hear the
writer's room arguing over the tone. Seriously.
Half the room wants a family comedy about a man
and his dog, and the other half is trying to
justify the edgy origins of the source material.
And then my personal favorite, episode 14, corn
star. Ed decides to run for the Homeowners Association
president simply because the height of his corn
stalks becomes an issue with the board. That
is hilarious. There is absolutely nothing internet
about that plot line. That could have been an
episode of the Golden Girls. The execution was
all over the map because the mechanism itself
was flawed. I mean, they were trying to manufacture
viral moments within the rigid structure of a
22 minute act break sitcom. Based on that tonal
confusion, I heard the reviews were an absolute
bloodbath. Oh, they were. Critics just eviscerated
this thing. They were brutal. We are talking
about a 28 out of 100 on Metacritic, and on Rotten
Tomatoes, based on 26 critic reviews, it holds
a mathematically difficult 0%. 0%. A 0 % requires
a unanimous consensus of disdain across the board.
The critical consensus on the site brutally cited,
quote, childish jokes, abysmal writing, and the
half -baked stunt casting of William Shatner.
They didn't hold back at all. Not even a little
bit. But here's where it gets really interesting.
I'm throwing a curveball your way. OK, I'm ready.
If the critics lows this show with every fiber
of their being, how did the premiere pull in
12 .58 million viewers? That's a huge number.
And how on earth did it win favorite new TV comedy
at the 37th People's Choice Awards in January
of 2011? It is the ultimate television paradox.
But, you know, if we break down those numbers,
it starts to make sense. Well, let's hear it.
Yes. 12 .58 million viewers tuned in for the
premiere. That is a massive number. But that
initial tune in was driven largely by the sheer
curiosity of the premise. The buzz. Right, you
have the built -in audience of the Twitter feed
and the undeniable magnetism of William Shatner.
People just wanted to see what this weird experiment
looked like. That makes sense. Now, the source
notes that over the next two episodes, they lost
nearly 20 % of that audience. Ah, so they tuned
in to see the car crash, realized it was just
a regular traffic jam, and then went home. Precisely.
The novelty wore off for a chunk of viewers who
realized it wasn't some revolution in television.
It was just a sitcom. Just a sitcom. But then,
the ratings stabilized. The fourth and fifth
episodes bounced back to over 10 million viewers.
It basically settled into a consistent groove
of about 9 to 10 million viewers a week. Which
is still really solid. It is. And that highlights
a vast, often ignored disconnect between television
critics and general audiences. Critics are evaluating
a show based on structural integrity, the quality
of the writing, the originality of the premise.
They are looking for art. Right. But if you were
sitting at home on a Thursday night in 2010,
you probably didn't care what a TV critic in
New York thought. You just wanted to unwind.
Exactly. A general audience sitting down on a
Thursday night often just wants the reassurance
of a multi -camera sitcom rhythm. They want the
recognizable face of William Shatner delivering
punchlines on a set that looks like a brightly
lit living room. The People's Choice Award kind
of proves that. It does. That award is a testament
to the fact that for a specific demographic,
the show delivered exactly what they wanted,
digestible, familiar entertainment. The comfort
food of television. Yeah. But even with nine
to 10 million people reliably showing up for
dinner every week, it wasn't enough. No, it wasn't.
Despite the decent viewership. CVS pulled the
plug. They canceled it on May 15th, 2011, after
just 18 episodes. It was even replaced mid -season
by a show called Rules of Engagement, which they
moved over from Mondays. Which shows that even
for a network that thrives on familiar comfort,
the execution here just wasn't sustainable. The
friction between the premise and the product
was simply too high. Yeah, but the friction regarding
the quality of the show? That was happening after
it aired. We have to talk about the fact that
an entirely different incredibly vocal group
was attacking the show before the pilot even
premiered. Oh yes. And it's entirely because
of the title. We need to talk about the Parents
Television Council or the PTC. The culture war
over a single word. Exactly. As soon as CBS announced
the show's official name and its 8 .3 p .m. time
slot at their upfront presentations in May 2010.
And for anyone listening who is unfamiliar, upfronts
are those massive glitzy events where networks
pitch their upcoming fall schedules to advertisers
to secure commercial funding. Thank you. Yes.
So at the upfronts, while the PTC went on the
immediate offensive, they announced a formal
protest because the title alluded to an obscenity.
Right. They didn't just write an angry letter.
They threatened CBS with broadcast license challenges
for any local affiliate station that dared to
air the show or its promos before 10 0 0 p .m.
And that is a very real, very serious threat
to a broadcast network's infrastructure because
it targets the local stations. Exactly. If you
threaten the local affiliates, the individual
stations across the country that actually beam
the signal into people's homes. You threaten
the entire distribution model. The network couldn't
just ignore it. So the corporate filter kicks
in immediately. The network scrambles to sanitize
the property they just bought. They modify the
title to comply with Federal Communications Commission
regulations during prime time. Hence the symbols.
Right. They swap out the letters for symbols,
the dollar sign, the hashtag, the asterisk, the
exclamation point. And in the press, they instruct
everyone to refer to it as bleak, my dad says.
They also had to systematically tone down and
modify the actual profanity from Halpern's original
Twitter feed for the scripts. Which is wild.
CBS defended the show to reporters, promising
that the expletive wouldn't be used in promos,
that the show would in no way be indecent, that
it would adhere to all CBS standards. And they
even pointed out that parents who are worried
could just use the V chip to block it. Right.
The V chip being that piece of technology built
into older televisions that allowed parents to
lock out programming based on its age rating.
It is really fascinating to watch the corporate
mechanism try to digest something inherently
edgy. I mean, they take a property famous specifically
because of its profanity and raw nature, and
then immediately assure advertisers and regulators
that they have removed all the profanity and
raw nature. That makes no sense. It's completely
counterintuitive to why they bought it in the
first place. Yeah. But William Shatner, to his
credit, was not having any of this PR spin. He
really wasn't. He gave this incredibly blunt
defense of the original title. I love this quote
from the source. He basically said, we say spit,
why can't we say shit? A fair phonetic argument,
I suppose. It's a bit simplistic for the FCC.
He didn't stop there, though. Later, at the Television
Critics Association press tour in July, he doubled
down. He told the press, quote, The word shit
is around us. It isn't a terrible term. It's
a natural function. Why are we pussyfooting?
Chander was effectively acting as the voice of
the internet in that moment, just completely
unfiltered and refusing to play the corporate
game. He really was. If we connect this to the
bigger picture, what this controversy really
represented was a fundamental clash of media
ecosystems. Bill Gorman, a writer for TV by the
numbers, pointed out that the PTC protests was
ultimately just giving the show massive free
publicity. Which he correctly predicted would
boost the premiere ratings. Exactly, and he was
right. 12 .58 million people tuned in. The controversy
worked as a marketing tool. It totally did. But
the core issue wasn't just about a swear word.
It was about the irreconcilable difference between
the unfiltered democratic freedom of the internet,
where a guy can just quote his dad and get millions
of followers because it feels authentic, and
the heavily regulated, advertiser friendly, politically
sensitive world of prime time television. They
just don't mix. No. Trying to adapt this Twitter
feed into a CBS sitcom is like trying to play
a chaotic open world video game using a rigid
two button joystick from 1985. The hardware of
network TV simply wasn't built for the software
of the unfiltered internet. That's a great way
to look at it. The essence of the Twitter food
was its transgression. By censoring the title
and softening the quotes to please the FCC and
the PTC, CBS basically stripped away the very
authenticity that made the property valuable
in the first place. It became a sanitized echo
of the thing it was trying to be. Which leads
us to its weird, fleeting legacy. I mean, it
was a total flash in the pan, but it left this
incredibly strange pop culture footprint. It
did. In 2011, Cartoon Network sketch show Maddie
actually aired a crossover parody promo called
Meep, my dad says. That is a phenomenal piece
of trivia. Isn't it? It featured the Looney Tunes
character, the Road Runner, playing the role
of the dad, and they used his classic Meep Meeps
to imitate the sensor bleeps. putting black bars
over his beak when he spoke. That's amazing.
When you're getting carotied by the road runner
over broadcast censorship, you have officially
entered the weirdest timeline of pop culture.
It definitely secured its place in the trivia
books, if nothing else. And as a quick footnote
from the source, the creator, Justin Haliburn,
actually did get a second shot at adapting his
blog based material into a series later on with
a show called Surviving Jack. But sticking to
our 2010 time capsule. So what does this all
mean for you listening right now? Why should
you care about an 18 -episode sitcom that got
canceled over a decade ago? Exactly. Well, this
show is the ultimate case study in what happens
when corporate media tries to package and sell
authenticity. The executives saw the numbers
on Twitter. They saw the raw engagement. And
they thought they could just buy that authenticity
and put it on a soundstage. But they couldn't.
No. No. Because the very act of adapting that
raw internet feed, censoring the title, adding
a laugh track, inventing a convoluted backstory
about a blogger moving home just to capture the
quotes fundamentally altered its appeal. They
bought a rebellious spirit and immediately gave
it a curfew. They wanted the edge without the
risk. Yes. And that leaves us with something
to really go on as we consume media today, because
this isn't just a 2010 problem. No, not at all.
The platforms have changed. The friction hasn't.
I think the lingering question here, the one
that applies to almost every viral TikTok star
or niche YouTube creator who gets a development
deal today, is this. When we demand that our
favorite unfiltered internet creators get these
massive mainstream opportunities, are we actually
asking for the very thing that will destroy the
authenticity we loved about them in the first
place? Because at the end of the day, no matter
how much money a network throws at it, you really
just can't build a sturdy house out of funny
bumper stickers. The first strong wind? or in
this case the first wave of television critics,
is going to blow the whole thing down.