By Su-Kim
Ah, potential is like a mind – a terrible thing to waste.
Case in point is CAVEMEN, acting as a lame-o gateway to the equally flaccid CARPOOLERS.
Cavepeople are living among us and working at regular joe jobs, just trying to “fit in” and occasionally getting it on with the hot babe “sapes.” There’s a brief mention of the peculiarly absent cavewomen, but it does provide one of the only funny lines in the show: “Keep you penis in your genus.” In this first episode, the main cavedude works for a version of Ikea (couldn’t get the rights…?), is dating a homosapien female and doesn’t want the other cavedudes to know for fear of phyla persecution. Yep. That’s all they could come up with after a months-long do-over.
CAVEMEN is based on the wildly popular characters from the Geico car insurance commercials, but sadly, that’s where the similarities end.
For most of the run of the ad campaign, the cro-mags are portrayed as hirsute yet dapper intellectuals with an appreciation for the finer things in life (like classical music and roast duck with mango salsa). From the sitcom, I was expecting something along the lines of FRAISER meets ALIEN NATION. What I got was bull meets sh*t.
Sadly, the creators went the lowest-common-denominator route and cranked out something that’s not even as amusing as THREE AND A HALF MEN. Arguments abounded as to why the original commercial actors had not been invited to portray their original characters, but now the point appears to be moot and in their favor. A bit like when John Corbett dodged a bullet and went with LUCKY instead of MY BIG FAT GREEK LIFE.
CAVEMEN would have been so much more entertaining had they gone the highbrow route. Golf, country clubs, recitals, opera, with the cro-mags being the sophisticated intellectuals and the majority of the sapes as slightly dimwitted boors (like most of the people you’ll encounter in Greenwich, CT).
On my lunch break I think I’m just gonna watch all the old commercials on YouTube and try to purge that debacle of a TV show from my short term memory.