Uh, right. Entertainment reporters are going to go breathless, magazines will do multipage spreads, Washington will go into a publicity-raising tizzy and viewers will tune in by the millions, all to see the makers of "South Park" make fun of... the sitcom format. That's a little like expecting people to watch the Pamela and Tommy Lee tape because it's a witty deconstruction of the homemade-honeymoon-video format.
What the network, and creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, probably really meant was that the sitcom (which was planned last fall, before the election, and but for the grace of Sandra Day O'Connor would just as gladly have targeted Al Gore) is not a partisan attack. Which is true enough. For one thing, as any "South Park" fan would have guessed, both sides get it bad here: a pro-choice activist, for instance, is cast as a butch, brush-cut, big-boned feminist. For another, the GWB Parker and Stone give is less an empty suit than a bumbling-dad character: a Rob Petrie who happens to trip over affairs of state instead of the ottoman. In the pilot, George (sitcom-style, that's how we know him, not as "Mr. President" or "Dubya") schedules a dinner with Laura and an abortion summit on the same night and has to race between the two; in episode 2, he stages a mock execution to impress some old frat buddies, but accidentally ends up holding a real one.
These "Three's Company"–esque switcheroo-gone-wrong scenarios are supposed to sound familiar and except for the political-issue angles, they do: way familiar. The real question about "That's My Bush!" is not how harsh it can get away with being (compared with, say, Bill Clinton humping a picture of Monica Lewinsky on the WB's "Hype" last fall, this is pretty much a love letter). It's whether two unoriginal ideas can make an original one. Let's face it, "Saturday Night Live" has not only been lampooning presidents for a quarter-century, it's been sending up the sitcom format for just as long (the kind of bouncy theme song that "Bush!" uses became a reliable warning sign of "SNL" irony-by-the-numbers years ago).
Yet the juxtaposition often works here. There's something fundamentally different between an "SNL" sketch and actually making the President into a character on a sitcom — our national storytelling form just as the epic poem was the Greeks'. It would be a reflexive op-ed columnist ploy — very Maureen Dowdian, very Frank Richian — to say the show works because it shows how the stage-management of a politician and a TV father figure are the same in today's media culture. But really "That's My Bush!" works because the two are still so different. Sitcoms take authority figures and big celebrities and invest them with human foibles to make them endearing, whereas political management takes a mere mortal and dresses him in the trappings of celebrity and authority (e.g., Bush and Gore standing in front of flags and aiming to be "presidential" during the Florida recount).
In other words, the very image of Bush as a fumblemouthed dolt that was a political liability (except in very well-managed, "humanizing" doses) is the stuff of a classic sitcom character. On a practical level, it helps that Bottoms ("The Last Picture Show" and... well, not a hell of a lot memorable since) has Bush down cold. Like many great imitators, he's not doing an impression: he doesn't sound a thing like the man, but he acts him uncannily, especially all those lost-little-boyisms that can give the President the look of a grown-up, Anglo Elian Gonzalez — the plaintively peaked eyebrows, the nose-rubbing, the whole uncomfortable demeanor of having just been forced into his Sunday-school clothes. Seeing him dash between his romantic dinner his state dinner, literally running between the worlds of sitcom artifice and political artifice, is jarring and funny in a way you might not think presidential imitations could still be.
But it's also a one-joke premise, and by the second episode you start to wonder how long it can carry the show. It doesn't help that the sitcom-parody angle gets old fast. In interviews, Parker and Stone stress their contempt for sitcoms, and I believe them: watching "That's My Bush!" it's easy to believe neither man has watched a sitcom since he was in grade school. Sure, a lot of the elements they make fun of here are still around: the sassy employee, the taped audience yelling "Whoo!" whenever a star comes on. But in execution, so to speak, "That's My Bush!" has the style and tone of a late-'70s sitcom, with a few '50s elements thrown in: the nosy-neighbor character is basically Larry from "Three's Company"; the smart-mouthed maid (appropriately, Marcia Wallace from "The Bob Newhart Show") is Florence from "The Jeffersons," which also supplies the gospel flourish at the end of the theme song. (Is it a coincidence that these shows were hits around the Ford and Carter administrations, themselves popularly roasted as fish-out-of-water comedies?)
Likewise, the catchphrase at the end of each episode — George says, "One of these days, Laura, I'm gonna punch you in the face!" along with the audience — is of course a "Honeymooners" allusion. It's hilarious the first time you hear it coming out of the President's mouth. But the spoof is also about as relevant as a satire of the Eisenhower administration's position on the Berlin situation. "That's My Bush!" is practically a Nick at Nite seminar; in a nicely goofy moment, when George holds his romantic dinner for Laura, he hires a mariachi band (he calls it a "jazz band") to play their song — the theme from "Sanford and Son."
The problem is that there's an awfully fine line between parodying lame sitcom jokes and actually making them. In fact, there probably isn't a line at all. At times "That's My Bush!" is indistinguishable from its source material. One of the least funny characters is George's dimwitted bimbo secretary, Princess, who is of course a mimic of countless unfunny bimbos in sitcoms past. But it's asking a lot of the audience to essentially will themselves into laughing at her: "It's not dated jiggle humor! It's a parody of dated jiggle humor!"
Likewise, a funny subplot in the second episode involves the improv troupe that Bush's adviser Karl Rove, the satanically scary Rasputin of the show, hires to stage the execution, providing a jumping-off point for some sharp jokes about how unfunny improv comedy can be. But in one way, it's also a disappointment, because it's not a sitcom parody at all; it's actually pretty competent conventional sitcom writing, of exactly the kind Parker and Stone are supposed to despise. And when Laura messes up one of George's speeches by putting a reminder of their diner date on the TelePrompTer, is it a clever blurring of the lines between political and sitcom scripting? Or a joke that wouldn't have been out of place on "Benson"?
For all that, "That's My Bush!" can and should be as funny and original as any of its major-network competition. There is, as the politicians say, a third way, between tired sitcom schtick and tired presidential-satire schtick, as the sitcom shows in several bizarre, indeed "South Park"–ian moments. Representing the pro-life contingent at Bush's abortion summit dinner is a 30-year-old, unsuccessfully aborted man — a bitter, balding fetus, played by an animatronic puppet, with undeveloped eye sockets and a foul mouth like "South Park"'s Eric Cartman (partly because Parker does his voice). Maybe the show's sharpest and most politically astute move, though, is the character of Rove (Kurt Fuller), the power behind George's smiling face. Plenty of satirists might write Rove as a controlling, amoral power freak. But only Parker and Stone would have him ecstatically suck the last expiring breath from an executed man's lungs.
At moments like these, "That's My Bush!" stops being a mere parody of anything and becomes its own, delightfully sick show. Not coincidentally, these are also the moments when, contrary to Parker and Stone's aw-shucks, we-just-wanna-make- fun-of-sitcoms spiel, it shows real political (if not partisan) bite, which is after all what you'd expect from two guys who produced "South Park" satires of the Elian Gonzalez raid and the Florida recount just days after the actual events. So far, they've sworn up and down that "That's My Bush!" won't be that kind of show. Let's just hope their denial is all part of the joke.