Welcome to the deep dive, Lerner. How does a
television show manage to win a favorite new
TV comedy award, you know, chosen entirely by
the viewing public, while at the exact same time
holding a literal zero percent rating from the
critical establishment? It is a pretty massive
contradiction. And today we are opening the Wikipedia
records of a, well, a uniquely 2010s cultural
artifact. Right. The CBS sitcom Bleep, my dad
says. And whether you are interested in media
history or pop culture phenomenons or just the,
you know, the structural mechanics of bizarre
industry missteps, this deep dive is an absolute
masterclass. It really is. It's a masterclass
in what happens when traditional network television
collides head on with early Internet culture.
Yeah, because we are going to explore the underlying
machinery of how a viral 140 character social
media account was somehow ripped from the Internet
and reversed engineered into a primetime broadcast
show. Complete with a soundstage and a laugh
track. Exactly. Okay, let's unpack this because
how do you even begin to translate a text -based
internet post into a 21 -minute multi -camera
sitcom? Whoa. To understand the sheer structural
incompatibility of that translation, we really
have to look at the timeline. The speed of it
all. Right. The speed is central to the story,
because the source material for this television
show wasn't a novel or a play or, you know, even
a traditional pitch document. It was literally
a Twitter feed. Which is wild to think about
now. It is. In 2009, A man named Justin Halpern
created an account simply called Shit My Dad
Says. Yeah. And the content was exactly what
the title advertised. It was just him quoting
his dad, right? Yeah, just disconnected, completely
out of context, highly profane quotations from
his 72 -year -old father, Sam. I am looking at
the history of that account right now, and it
really was just a guy tweeting the ridiculous,
completely unfiltered things his dad would say
around the house. And it was brilliant in its
simplicity. It really was, but it's entirely
asynchronous. You read a tweet, you laugh, and
you just scroll on. But the network saw the follower
count and practically tripped over themselves
to buy it. They did. I mean, by November of 2009,
CBS announced they were developing a television
pilot based on this Twitter feed. Written by
Halpern himself and Patrick Schumacher. Right.
And then by late February 2010, they had cast
the lead role, which immediately triggered a
green light for full production. Which is an
incredibly compressed timeline for network television.
I mean, that's basically overnight in Hollywood
terms. Exactly. The casting of that lead role
was their first big attempt to force an internet
phenomenon into a recognizable television shape.
And they cast William Shatner. Yes. I mean, he
was brought on to play Dr. Edison Milford Goodson
III, or Ed, a 72 -year -old highly opinionated
former doctor who has been divorced three times.
So they secure their eccentric dad. Right, they
got the dad. But I'm trying to picture the actual
mechanics of this transition, because a Twitter
feed of random quotes has no narrative. of tissue
at all. It has no continuous space or time. Taking
a chaotic 2010 Twitter feed and turning it into
a CBS multi -camera sitcom feels like... like
trying to run a modern TikTok video and stretch
it into a two hour movie. That is a great comparison.
The underlying architecture just isn't built
to process it. You can't just have William Shatner
standing in a kitchen reciting tweets for 21
minutes straight. No, you can't. And that is
the exact architectural problem they faced because
a multi -camera sitcom requires a situational
engine. It relies on a synchronized, continuous
physical space, usually a living room or a kitchen
set, where characters are literally forced to
interact. They need a reason to be in the room
together. Exactly. It needs a mechanism to keep
them there every week to generate conflict, which
then leads to a setup and a punchline. But a
tweet is entirely devoid of that context. Because
when you read a tweet, your own brain fills in
the background. Right. But television has to
build the background. And the background they
built was just incredibly convoluted. To create
that situational engine, they engineered a son
character, Henry, played by Jonathan Sadowski.
And Henry is written as a struggling writer and
blogger. Because he can't afford his rent, he
is forced to move back in with his dad, Ed. Which
is a very classic setup. It is. But then, Henry
goes to a job interview, and he only gets the
job because his dad interrupts the interview
with an incredibly irrational phone call. Of
course. And the eccentric editor conducting the
interview overhears this, finds the dad absolutely
fascinating, and hires Henry on one very specific
condition. Which is? Henry has to farm his dad's
unsolicited rants for internet content. That
is literally the only way he can keep his paying
job. Wow. So looking at that frantic timeline
from a Twitter feed in late 2009 to a CBS pick
-up in May 2010, I have to ask. Does this premise
actually reflect the organic nature of social
media, or was it just a desperate scramble to
map an internet trend onto a legacy format? Oh,
it is heavily the latter. I mean, if we connect
this to the bigger picture, the why behind this
specific plot format is entirely driven by network
anxiety. You're scared. CBS was terrified they
would purchase this viral property, but the executives
were deeply anxious about whether a Twitter feed
could actually sustain a narrative for 22 episodes
a season. So they panicked. Yeah. So they bolted
the internet trend onto a highly traditional
structurally safe odd couple father son dynamic.
Right. They invented this convoluted narrative
where Henry is a blogger. who was contractually
obligated to live with his dad and record him
just to justify why the title of the show even
exists within the universe of the series. Oh,
I see. The show is constantly trying to explain
its own premise to the audience. Exactly. They
were reverse engineering a traditional 1990s
sitcom just to justify a 2010 Twitter handle.
That's exactly what they were doing. But the
network fundamentally misunderstood the format
of the internet. And their lack of understanding
didn't stop at the script. It immediately clashed
with broadcast law the moment they tried to name
the show. Yes, the title. Because you can't just
call a primetime CBS network show shit my dad
says over public airwaves. No. The FCC would
absolutely not allow that. Right. To comply with
FCC primetime rules regarding profanity, they
had to censor the title visually. It became a
series of symbols. Dollar sign, pound sign, exclamation
point, officially pronounced bleep, my dad says.
But even that visual censorship wasn't enough
to stop the impending outrage. Not at all. And
here's where it gets really interesting. What's
fascinating here is that you are seeing a real
time collision of two completely different eras
of media regulation. Yeah. You have the unregulated
frontier of the Internet. colliding head -on
with a heavily regulated, historically puritanical
space of broadcast television. So true. And in
May of 2010, CBS announced the show's official
name, and it's 8 .30 p .m. Thursday time slot
at their Upground presentation. Let me pause
you there, because we need to define what that
actually is for the listener. Good idea. An upfront
presentation isn't just a basic press conference.
It is a massive high stakes sales pitch where
television networks present their fall schedules
to major advertisers. Right. Trying to convince
them to buy commercial time months in advance.
Exactly. Billions of dollars are committed at
up -fronts. So you can imagine the advertisers'
faces when a show with a profanity heavily implied
in the title flashed up on the screen for an
8 .30 p .m. family time slot. I'm sure they were
thrilled. Oh, totally. And almost immediately,
the Parents Television Council or the PTC heavily
protested. They argued that the title was unacceptable
because it explicitly alluded to an obscenity.
And they didn't just write an angry letter to
CBS headquarters. No, they went much further.
The PTC threatened broadcast license challenges
for any local affiliate that dared to air the
show or even its promotional commercials before
10 p .m. Wait, hold on. Local affiliates. Why
target the local stations? I mean, if CBS is
making the show, why is the PTC threatening the
local news station in Ohio or Texas? Well, because
of how broadcast licensing actually works. CBS
is a national corporate entity. provides the
programming. OK. But it is the local affiliate
stations that actually hold the FCC broadcast
licenses to transmit that programming over public
airwaves in their specific region. Oh, I see.
So by threatening those specific licenses, the
PTC was threatening the fundamental ability of
those local stations to operate at all. Wow.
They were trying to create a localized panic
that would force the national network to pull
the show. Exactly. which forced CBS into a massive
defensive posture. Yeah. The network had to come
out and publicly promise that the show would,
quote, in no way be indecent. They assured reporters
they would adhere to all CBS. Yeah. For those
who don't remember, the V -chip was a piece of
technology mandated by the FCC to be built into
television sets that allowed parents to block
programming based on its age rating. So CBS is
essentially telling parents, hey, if you don't
like it, use the hardware in your TV to block
it. Pretty much. But William Shatner handled
this very differently. Oh, he definitely did.
At the July 2010 Television Critics Association
press tour, Shatner was asked about this whole
title controversy, and he delivered a very blunt
defense. What did he say? He said, we say spit.
Why can't we say shit? It's a natural function.
Why are we pussyfooting? That is a very Ed Goodson
response. It really is. But I have to point out
the hilarious irony of the PTC's entire strategy
here. Yeah. A show based on a Twitter feed, you
know, a platform known globally for being chaotic,
unfiltered and entirely user generated, was forcing
network executives to have a serious hand wringing
debate about the word shit at corporate press
doors. They were trying to sanitize the very
thing they bought it for. incredibly ironic and
structurally, it completely backfired on the
protesters. How so? Well, Bill Gorman, writing
for TV by the numbers at the time, correctly
predicted exactly what the mechanical outcome
of this protest would be. OK. He pointed out
that the PTC was essentially running a massive
unpaid marketing campaign for CBS. Oh, of course.
By creating a forbidden allure around what was
actually a rather standard sitcom, they were
generating the Streisand effect. The psychological
phenomenon where attempting to hide or censor
information simply draws massive public attention
to it. Precisely. The controversy didn't suppress
the show, it amplified it. Right. The outrage
was a massive driver for the tune -in numbers
of the premiere. Which makes sense. But this
raises an important question. Once the mechanics
of the Streisand effect got people in the door,
what did they actually see on screen? Right.
So the audience sits down on September 23, 2010.
Let's look at the actual content of the show,
because this is where the friction between the
internet origin and the television format really
grinds the gears. It really does. So the network
built out a supporting cast of seasoned comedy
veterans. You had Will Sasso playing Henry's
brother Vince, and Nicole Sullivan playing Vince's
wife Bonnie. Which is an interesting pairing.
Yeah. What's crucial here is that Sasso and Sullivan
were actually former castmates on the sketch
comedy show Mad TV. Oh, wow. You also had recurring
characters. like Tim, played by Tim Bagley, and
eventually a love interest for Ed named Rosemary.
Bringing in sketch comedy veterans like Sasso
and Sullivan is a very specific structural choice.
How do you mean? Well, multi -camera sitcoms
require actors who understand how to hold for
laughs, how to project to a live studio audience,
and how to maintain a highly polished comedic
rhythm. That makes sense, but getting to that
polished rhythm was pretty messy. Yeah, the development
was rough. I noticed in the Wiki notes that there
was a lot of behind -the -scenes shuffling. In
the pilot, the son Henry was originally played
by Ryan Devlin before Jonathan Sadowski took
over the role. There was also a character named
Sam, played by Stephanie Lemelin, who was completely
eliminated. Like, she never appeared in the broadcast
pilot or any subsequent episodes. Which is honestly
standard operating procedure for the multi -camera
format. Really, just completely cutting characters.
Yeah. The writers and producers are constantly
adjusting the chemistry on the fly, testing what
works in front of an audience. That makes sense.
But what really reveals the DNA of the show...
isn't the casting adjustments. It's the plot
lines they ultimately decided to execute. Oh,
the plot lines. Let me read you a few of these
from the Wikipedia page, Lerner, because I want
you to really picture what was broadcasting into
millions of homes. This should be good. In episode
14, titled Corn Star, Ed runs for the president
of the homeowners association simply to protect
the height of his corn stalks. Which is just
such a standard sitcom trope. Right. And then
in episode 13, the better father, Bonnie and
Vince, realize their wedding was performed by
a fake reverend. Oh, of course they do. So they
throw a second wedding. But it's disastrous because
it's ruined by Bonnie's gambling -addicted father,
played by guest star Ed Begley Jr., who finds
a gambling chip and literally ditches the wedding.
Classic. And it ends with a highly sentimental
moment where Ed steps up and walks Bonnie down
the aisle. And then there is episode 17, Lock
and Load. Ed's neighbor Rosemary accidentally
shoots Vince thinking he's an intruder. Wait,
shoots him? Yes, accidentally shoots him. And
why does she think he's an intruder? Because
Vince is hiding out in the garage watching porn
so he can figure out how to have a baby correctly
with Bonnie. Wow. It is quite a departure from
a 140 -character quote about everyday life. I
have to push back on the entire premise of the
show's existence here. I mean, listen to those
plot lines. Do those sound like... edgy observational
internet quotes to you? Not at all. Or does it
sound like they just took a standard wacky CBS
sitcom script from 1998 and pasted William Shatner
into the middle of it? It is absolutely the latter,
and this highlights the core mechanical failure
of the adaptation. The show completely abandoned
the simple charm of its source material. The
original Twitter feed was funny. because it was
grounded. It felt real. Exactly. It was a real
dad's off the cuff, bizarre remarks contrasting
with the mundane reality of everyday life. Right.
But the television show replaced that mundane
reality with highly constructed frantic situational
comedy. You have fake reverends, you have accidental
shootings, you have HOAs and corn stocks. It's
pure television artifice. Yes. They took a property
that felt incredibly authentic and unfiltered
to people online. And they processed it through
the very conventional rigidly structured machinery
of the Warner Brothers television multi -camera
format. And that just ruined it. The format itself
sanded down all the edges that made the Twitter
feed popular in the first place. Which leads
us directly to the paradox I mentioned at the
top of the show. We have to look at how this
show was received because we are looking at a
tale of two entirely different realities here.
We really are. Let's start with the experts,
the critical establishment. Well, the critics
absolutely brutalized the show. They hated it.
On Metacritic, which aggregates reviews, it holds
a score of 28. Out of 100. Ouch. Gets much worse.
On Rotten Tomatoes, based on 26 different critic
reviews, the series has a flat zero percent.
A zero? A literal zero percent. The critical
consensus literally calls out the childish jokes,
abysmal writing, and the half -baked stunt casting
of William Shatner. They did not hold back. No,
they saw the disconnect we just discussed, and
they rejected it entirely. I have to stop you
there. A literal zero percent. I mean, I get
that it wasn't high art. I get that the plot
lines were absurd. Sure. But Will Sasso and Nicole
Sullivan are sketch comedy veterans. William
Shanner is a television legend. How does a show
with that level of foundational comedic talent
yield a mathematical zero? Were they really that
bad? Well, it wasn't necessarily that the actors
were incompetent. It's about what the critics
were measuring. OK, what were they measuring?
The critics were grading the execution of the
premise. They were looking at the hype, the promise
of this edgy rule breaking internet feed and
judging it against the reality of clunky sitcom
tropes and abysmal writing. Oh, I see. They saw
a cynical corporate cash grab that failed to
deliver on its own title. OK, so the critics
graded the adaptation and gave it an F. But then,
you look at the audience numbers. The numbers
tell a different story. They really do. That
premiere episode on September 23rd, a massive
12 .58 million viewers tuned in. That is huge.
Now, you could easily argue that's just the Streisand
effect in action from the PTC title controversy.
People just wanted to see what the forbidden
fruit looked like. Which is very likely. And
sure, over the next two weeks, the ratings did
drop nearly 20%. But here is the kicker. They
stabilized. They did. Episodes 4 and 5 actually
climbed back up to around 10 .16 and 10 .91 million
viewers. They consistently hovered around that
9 to 10 million viewer mark for months. Which,
you know, in the landscape of television, even
in 2010, is a very solid, highly enviable audience
block. But wait, it gets crazier. On January
5, 2011, right in the middle of its run, this
show... The one with the 0 % Rotten Tomatoes
score actually wins an award. Unbelievable. It
wins Favorite New TV Comedy at the 37th People's
Choice Awards. Wow. It even cemented itself in
pop culture enough that Cartoon Network's sketch
show M .A .D. ran a parody of it called Meep
My Dad Says, where the road runner played the
dad using his meeps to imitate the sensor bleeps.
That is amazing. So what does this all mean?
How in the world can a show get a literal 0 %
from experts, but win an award chosen by the
viewing public and hold 10 million viewers a
week. Well, this requires us to look at the mechanics
of how different groups consume media. The critics
and the audience were watching two completely
different shows, functionally speaking. How so?
As we established, the critics were evaluating
it as a failed piece of transmedia art. But the
audience, those 10 million people tuning in every
Thursday night, They weren't looking for groundbreaking
art. What were they looking for? They were likely
using it as comfort viewing. Yes, the censor
title was a stunt to get them to look. But once
they were looking, what they found was incredibly
familiar, unchallenging network television. It
was essentially a hypermodern billboard advertising
a 1990s diner. Exactly. It had a beloved -o pop
culture icon in William Shatner. It had the familiar,
soothing auditory rhythms of a laugh track. It
had comforting, easily resolvable plots about
HOAs and family squabbles that wrap up neatly
in 21 minutes. It gave them exactly what they
wanted. It delivered exactly what a Thursday
night CBS audience mechanically expected, regardless
of what the Internet source material promised.
But even 10 million viewers and a People's Choice
Award couldn't save it from the network machinery.
No, it could not. The demise came pretty swiftly.
The show was pulled and replaced mid -season
by the sitcom Rules of Engagement, which was
moved over from Mondays to fill the slot. Right.
And finally, on May 15th, 2011, CBS officially
canceled the series entirely after just 18 episodes.
Though, to be fair to Justin Halpern, the concept
did linger. True. It spawned a spiritual successor
series based on his writing called Surviving
Jack a few years later. Right. But the fact that
it was canceled despite those steady viewership
numbers points right back to that initial network
anxiety. They just didn't get it. They never
really understood the architecture of what they
bought. They didn't know how to market it once
the controversy faded. And they ultimately didn't
know what to do with the show, even when it was
working on a demographic level. Which makes this
whole saga such a perfect time capsule. It really
is. As we wrap up this deep dive, Lerner, I want
you to think about the story of Bleep Day. My
dad says not just as a canceled TV show, but
as a snapshot of the media landscape in 2010.
A very specific moment in time. Yeah. It is the
ultimate proof that a network can write a massive
check. to buy the intellectual property rights
to a viral internet trend, but they cannot necessarily
translate the structural soul of that trend onto
a sound stage. You can't just run an internet
operating system on a legacy television mainframe
and expect it to function authentically. It is
a structural lesson the entertainment industry
is still grappling with today. Absolutely. But
it leaves us with a lingering question, something
to really mull over. We look at this show's bizarre
legacy. It wins a People's Choice Award. It maintains
nearly 10 million weekly viewers, but it gets
swiftly canceled after just one season while
holding a 0 % critical rating. Right. So who
actually gets to decide if a piece of media is
a success? Is it the critics who demand artistic
integrity and structural cohesion? Is it the
network executives who control the schedule and
panic over the underlying architecture? Or is
it the millions of people who quietly tune in
every Thursday night? just looking for a familiar
comforting rhythm to end their day.