"Hiller" alone would be a pretty bad TV show.
"Hiller & Diller" together is a remarkably terrible TV show.This attempt to be "The Dick Van Dyke Show" for the '90s is embarrassingly bad. It's badly cast, badly written and badly acted.
Kevin Nealon ("Saturday Night Live") stars as Ted Hiller, sort of an everyday guy and devoted family man who happens to be a successful television writer.
If the show were just about Hiller, it would be a truly lame family sitcom, complete with your standard-issue sitcom wife (Jordan Baker) and a trio of standard-issue, precocious sitcom kids.
What passes for humor here is having kids hypnotized by the television set. Maybe it's wishful thinking on the part of the producers, because nobody is going to hypnotized by this show.
But as weak as the show is when it focuses no the Hiller family, just wait until the Dillers join in. The ever-annoying Richard Lewis plays Neil Diller, a neurotic (what else?) little man who's in the midst of his second divorce and whose two children from his first marriage are obnoxious delinquents.
The ludicrous but unfunny pilot includes a trip to a Mexican jail cell and Diller's attempt to get his kids into a private school by hiring actors to impersonate them.
There are two things about "Hiller & Diller" that are truly surprising. First, that anyone in their right mind could have thought that Nealon and Lewis could carry a series. It's not just that neither one of them has much in the way of acting ability - neither one of them comes across as likable enough that viewers would actually want to spend a half-hour with them.
And the two have absolutely no chemistry together - which should be no surprise considering they're the acting equivalents of an inert compound.
The second surprise is that the show counts among its executive producers Ron Howard (Opie himself), Brian Grazer, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel - the team behind hits like "Splash" and "Parenthood." They should be embarrassed.
And, supposedly, the series is somewhat based on the experiences of Ganz and Mandel, who were sitcom writers before they moved on to movies. They should be really embarrassed.