I remember back to when our area’s cable infrastructure was first updated to support digital cable and all of the channels that come with it, and as far as I was concerned, this was the best one in the entire line-up. Interesting and non-retarded originals, backed by plenty of stand-up comedy filling all of the major time slots…so what the hell happened?!
It all started Sunday evening when I caught a late-night airing of The Roast of Denis Leary that I realized just how good that channel used to be. Not that I expected a whole lot out of Denis himself – I liked the Asshole song, but most of his comedy always seemed kinda harsh for me – but the entire roast itself was just awful, almost to the point of being mean. I’ve seen plenty of roasts that still managed to get the entire point of the roast itself across while still keeping the bleep count out of the three-digit range, but that didn’t seem to be an issue this time around. And even though I don’t really care for Jim Breuer’s comedy, either, I really think that he could’ve saved it all at the end, but instead he dropped the ball and just made the wounds even deeper! I thought it would’ve been pretty cool if he had started singing Asshole and then had Denis himself join in, yet somehow he thought it would be a better idea to butcher it with screaming and heavy metal, thus placing the icing on the cake that suck made.
And from the looks of it, this fall’s line-up isn’t going to be any better, either. The Man Show just won’t be the same without Adam and Jimmy, no questions asked, but to top things off, Joe Rogan is filthy and hell, I don’t even know who Doug Stanhope is! I truly believe that this will be the season where this show actually does go too far, which is really too bad because it used to be hilarious. If you’ve ever heard Joe’s comedy album, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about – he was entertaining on Fear Factor because NBC kept a close eye on him and he had to watch his mouth, but now that he’s on cable, oh how the profanities will fly… The other new originals coming up are just pathetic, hardly even worth mentioning here, but I guess all I can really say is that I expected more from Comedy Central, especially with all of the reality-based crap on every other network, yet they somehow managed to squeeze themselves right into the mold between Temptation Island: Triplets and Who Wants to Marry an Imposter? with the greatest of ease.
I knew there was a reason that I kept paying for HBO and the “premium” channels…