"Father of the Pride" is yet another example of how not to make a television show.
Ideally, the folks who make TV shows come up with a great idea and then figure out a way to make their great idea into a great TV show.
"Father of the Pride," however, is more about form than function. And NBC and DreamWorks put the proverbial cart before the horse. Over a period of years, NBC Universal President Jeff Zucker repeatedly went to DreamWorks exec Jeffrey Katzenberg, trying to get him to do a show using the same computer-generated animation process employed in "Shrek." Katzenberg repeatedly turned him down, saying it couldn't be done for a weekly TV show.
But the technology reached the point where Katzenberg agreed, so he went looking for a show to fit the technology. Which is analogous to signing a big star to do a TV show and then trying to figure out what to do with the big star.
Usually, that doesn't turn out well. And "Father of the Pride," while fairly amazing to look at and occasionally amusing, didn't turn out good.
Basically, this is a bawdy comedy — albeit one that's not particularly funny — about a family. A family of lions. White lions. White lions who perform in Siegfried and Roy's Las Vegas act. Which, of course, is defunct in real life. But more on that later.
Family patriarch Larry (voiced by John Goodman of "Roseanne" and the forthcoming CBS sitcom "Center of the Universe") is sort of a blue-collar guy . . . er, uh, lion, who just happens to be working for Siegfried and Roy. He's married to Kate (Cheryl Hines of "Curb Your Enthusiasm"), who's the daughter of legendary lion headliner Sarmoti (Carl Reiner), who's now a semiretired, oversexed senior citizen.
Larry and Kate are the parents of a rebellious teen daughter, Sierra, and 9-year-old son, Hunter. And the menagerie includes various lions, tigers, elephants and Larry's pal, Snack the gopher (Orlando Jones).
If this all sounds cute, well, it isn't. Essentially, tonight's premiere is one big off-color joke with a plot that centers on the, um, mating habits of a couple of pandas. Not to mention the lions.
As I've written here before, "Father of the Pride" is not a show for children. The first sex joke comes less than 20 seconds into tonight's debut episode.
"Hey, Big Daddy is home and he's ready for lovin'," Larry proclaims when he gets home. "It may be 9 o'clock in New York, but right here, it's mountin' time."
And I don't care how many times NBC tells viewers this is an "adult comedy," the fact remains that the cute, cuddly, animated animal characters are going to attract young viewers to the show — which airs at 8 p.m. in this time zone. (Tonight's 9 p.m. airing is an exception.)
So there will be plenty of kids watching when lots of off-color words come out of the mouths of those cute, cuddly, animated animal characters. They'll be listening when Sarmoti dismisses the attempts to spark romance between the pandas in favor of just plain sex.
"Chemistry? What chemistry?" he says. "You're a panda, I'm a panda. . . . Thanks for the ride."
And there are "jokes" more "adult" than that.
Plus, there's a big, purple elephant in the room with "Father of the Pride" that nobody at NBC or DreamWorks wants to address — the pall that still lies over the mere mention of Siegfried and Roy since Roy was attacked by one of his tigers during a performance. That incident shut down the show and, frankly, made "Father of the Pride" a weird idea indeed.
Granted, the show was in development long before the attack. And NBC and DreamWorks had invested boatloads of money they were loathe to lose.
But sometimes it's better to call it quits and limit your losses.
Perhaps the single least believable statement made by any network executive to TV critics this summer (with the possible exception of Fox execs insisting they never stole anybody else's ideas for reality shows) came when NBC's Zucker insisted with a straight face that in all the research the network did on the show the attack "never comes up with the viewers."
Puh-leeze. What's the first thing most people think of when they think of Siegfried and Roy these days? Gimme a break.
And that colors the entire show. There are some amusing moments — particularly moments in which the CGI-animated Siegfried and Roy appear (voiced by Julian Holloway and Dave Herman), but laughs come uneasily.
What, are they going to make the attack into a Very Special Episode for the November sweeps?
Of course not. But that — along with the fact that "Father of the Pride" is, at best, only sporadically mildly amusing and, at worst, downright smutty — makes this one of the season's most disappointing new shows.
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com