The vultures started circling the moment ABC announced Cavemen last spring. That it was a sitcom starring intelligent, modern-day cavemen was enough to stir memories of Mr. Smith. That the characters were taken from a series of GEICO commercials didn't lend it much credibility. And when word got out that the whole thing was supposed to be a commentary on contemporary race relations, as seen in a none-too-promising clip that made the rounds on the Internet last spring, it seemed doomed, nevermind a subsequent round of retooling and recasting and the decision not to send out screeners to critics.
First impressions can be wrong, of course. And bad buzz can be nothing more than buzz. But not here. Cavemen actually isn't a terrible show. It's just a pseudo-hip mediocrity about young single men who happen to be cavemen. In fact, that they're cavemen at all is mostly incidental. If anything, it reminds me of an article our beloved sister publication ran many years ago about a sitcom that had been retooled to include a "feral subhuman." The graphic had script pages in which a standard sitcom script had lines randomly crossed out and replaced with grunts and urrgghhs.
But these cavemen don't grunt and urrgghh. They're just like us. And that's in the service of a point about racism, I guess, but it also means that they can't do hilarious caveman things. And if I'm going to watch a show called Cavemen, I want some hairy knuckled caveman antics. Wait, does that make me racist?
Also potentially making me racist: I can't tell them apart. But I think that has more to do with the not-so-impressive make-up than anything else. Everyone here is on a continuum that ranges form the highly sarcastic to the only occasionally sarcastic. Some of the wisecracks could be worse. But they could also be a whole lot better and there's really no reason to tune in beyond the desire to see a train wreck that never quite happens.