Upsetting Day: The Pitts🌭

The Pitts is a family sitcom from 2003. It’s also a failed dark comedy, written by failing comedians, surrounded by grimmer real life horrors.

The Pitts ran for one season. One season, lasting seven episodes. Also only five episodes aired before cancellation. These are not the counting stats of a hit television show. But how could The Pitts have failed? Look at that poster. Smiles!? Even though it’s raining? Directly raining on them specifically?? Wow. Ha ha, wow, ha ha. I’m starting to think this family is NOT your TYPICAL television FAMILY!!!! Can you even imagine a family sitcom where the nuclear family is not the all-American ideal? And where outlandish things happen? What would that even look like–

Oops. My computer uploaded an image from 1987. Sixteen years later, The Pitts broke bold new ground, in the sense that its creators were finished working on The Simpsons. The Pitts came to us FROM THE TWISTED MINDS OF television writers Mike Scully (The Simpsons) and Julie Thacker-Scully (Mike Scully’s Wife, Mike Scully’s Plus-One, Mike Scully’s Pointless Hanger-On, I Wish I Didn’t Think That But Her IMDb Indicates I’m Not Being Nearly As Sexist As I Fear). These co-creators asked a thrilling question: what if a family sitcom was wackier than The Simpsons, less grounded than The Simpsons, and packed with the EDGIEST JOKES ever conceived by a comfortable white collar couple? For example, they did the “personal rain cloud” joke from the year 1940. What a wild choice in 2003. Look out, George W. Bush’s America. There’s a new comedic tone in town – and it’s from George H. W. Bush’s childhood.

I tolerated two episodes of The Pitts. Many thanks to HotDogger “Ozzie” for providing them to me for free. The show’s theme song opens with a happy family photo, followed by the four nuclear family members fleeing an oncoming locomotive.

I take back what I said about this being comedy from the 1940s. It might be from the 1890s? Setting timelines aside, you can tell The Pitts is what qualifies as “hardcore” to a well-off couple raising five daughters. These writers are fresh off a tea party attended by dolls. They’re not gonna write television characters who do bad things or hate each other or question where society is headed. Instead, The Pitts asks what would happen if the corny family sitcoms of the past incorporated the corny joke-book version of “danger”.

I don’t know if I’ve ever felt more insulted by a sitcom. It’s like watching your least interesting aunt and uncle make a teevee show. If you wandered into a side room of your family’s holiday gathering, and picked up a loose Mad Libs product, you could generate the concept “then the TEENAGER saw a WEREWOLF.” The Scully family wrote that concept on a studio lot, in exchange for enough money to fund five faildaughter tuitions.

Beyond daughter enrichment, this Scully show feels written for their daughters’ enjoyment. Or written for children in general? But too much so. Even a Nickelodeon executive would surprise themselves as they dictated studio notes of “less dinosaurs, less slime.”

Screenshots-wise, we are a mere twenty seconds into this show. Moving forward: The Pitts is about a suburban family whose members all know the family is cursed to experience constant disasters. They talk about that fact much more than we see it happen. “Tell don’t show”, as the pros say after a head injury. All the family members know they are cursed. The parents are upbeat about the curse. The kids are sad about the curse. Both perspectives are tedious. For example, the pilot begins (IN FOX WIDESCREEN) with the family performing an exorcism on their son.

The parents thank the priests for doing this kind of thing for them, again. The son snaps out of his demonic possession, in shock that he’s been possessed, again. Then the daughter and an altar boy have a meet cute while cleaning up the vomit from the demonic possession, which is something Daughter is doing again because those darn Pitts can’t seem to avoid a bland comedy writer’s first idea of bad luck.

The Pitts opposite-of-builds on this formula with a weaker beginning for their second episode. It opens with Mister Pitt eating a snack food that has “Peanut” in the name. He eats this snack because he forgot about his lethal peanut allergy. Then the family gives him a hokey version of the chestal adrenaline shot from Pulp Fiction. Wow: an emergency medical intervention… in a sitcom! Can you even imagine seeing that on TV? In the year 2003?? A year when your soul was still a little deadened by fresh memories of using your TV screen to see 9/11???

The Scullys ask a lot of us. They ask us to be awed by a sitcom with one joke, the opposite of edge, and no other elements. The entire rest of the pilot is a few mild disagreements, a villain plot that almost works, and the 1980s stand-up comedy premise of “Mail Boxes Et Cetera is a business model without obvious profitability”.

Both parents operate a Mail Boxes Etc type store. The show thinks this is hilarious. Who would even use such a store? Doesn’t your house have a mailbox? Anyway, this setting leads to one joke about the store not having many customers. “No customers” leads to zero further jokes, because you can’t get humor out of putting your character in an empty room. It’s not funny for the same reasons it’s not funny to put your main character in solitary confinement, or a coffin. Still: you have to appreciate the incisive dig at Mail Boxes Etc. What a dumb, pointless business that actually made money if you look it up. Mail Boxes Etc. made so much money, UPS muscled it out of their turf in exchange for nine figures. The show’s creators don’t know this, and not just because they are incurious. The show’s creators would never go to such a silly business, because ever since Mike became showrunner of The Simpsons he had assistants and gofers handle the Scully household’s personal errands on top of their actual job. Those flunkies’ labor freed Mike to write brilliant jokes about Korean restaurants having discarded cats in their back alley trash cans. I’m not riffing. The Pitts makes this joke more than once, within the two episodes I watched. I assume Mike “thought of this joke” in the sense that his pre-Simpsons boss was Yakov Smirnoff, and one of Yakov’s mid-sized city’s comedy club’s weeknight opener comics said something along those lines in Mike’s earshot. This recycled racist joke made me angry in a way that took the edge off the rest of The Pitts. Later, Mike writes scenes where a teenage girl grabs her brother’s nose with kitchen tongs, because she is upset with him. Relatable? Extreme? Hilarious? At least it’s not the cat thing!

Episode One almost pulls off an edgy villain plotline. The dad reveals he is a terrible person, who stood up his prom date two decades ago. This prom date turns out to be obsessed with stealing Mister Pitt from his family, by worming her way in as their creepy nanny. That’s a plot! It is sort of a Simpsons plot but it’s enough of a different idea for me to be fine with it. Bring on “Sideshow Shelly”.

After becoming the Pitts’ nanny, Shelly locks the mother and kids and dog in one of those big steamer trunks from 1935. With them out of the way, Shelly tries to romance Mister Pitt. Then the family breaks out and the mother kicks Shelly into a bathtub along with an electrical appliance. This event could kill Shelly but doesn’t. It’s both darker than the average sitcom, and less gritty than anything Tom And Jerry ever did.

The second episode’s story is more random. It’s also a cop-out on the edge front. Daughter gets her first car. The car is haunted. The car speaks about being hot for Daughter. The car also speaks in a Black voice that sounds like it’s voiced by a White guy? It’s not clear which element is supposed to be scariest. Either way, on an edgy surreal sitcom, the car would go for it. The car would proceed to take her virginity or pimp her out or make her suck an item sold by Pep Boys. On this sitcom, the car does not go for it. On this sitcom written by the doting parents of five daughters, the evil car’s evil plot is to marry Daughter. Admittedly the car tries to marry her at the least reputable church type (Las Vegas wedding chapel). But matrimony is not evil. Matrimony is only worrisome in the context of racist Black Boyfriend panic. The Pitts does that in the tone of Disney Channel magic hijinks movies, right down to the car’s Herbie The Love Bug (1968) make and model.

Three short years after this episode aired, vast audiences of children wondered if Lightning McQueen feels romantic love for Sally Carrera. Modern America finds that question so tame, they demanded airplane spinoffs on top of the car sequels. Meanwhile, this theoretically hardcore Fox sitcom made a car fall in love with a beautiful teenager, and paid that off with a chase sequence tamer than the Beverly Hillbillies intro.

I’m skimming these plots because I don’t have new ways to say “they did the one joke again.” The one joke is wacky disasters befalling a family who dress like whitebread sitcom characters. As Mike Scully’s betters once wrote, “that’s the joke.” The joke is suffocating. The Pitts feels like a version of The Simpsons where all the family members lament living in the world of the television show The Simpsons, and say that so often they can’t get around to doing Simpsons stuff. That’s a bad show no matter what. It’s a nightmare to receive that show from the showrunner of The Simpsons. The Pitts was Mike Scully’s blank check of a next TV project after running Simpsons seasons nine through twelve. He turned that opportunity into such a bad show, it overshadows his Simpsons achievements. In a bizarre way, it makes me feel better about Scully’s time running that show. Fans debate whether showrunner Mike Scully sparked the entire decline of The Simpsons. When you watch The Pitts, it’s hard to imagine him understanding the basic concept of The Simpsons, let alone playing an active role in making it. He’s so useless at comedy, I think the other Simpsons writers firewalled Scully off from doing anything. If he actively ran The Simpsons it would’ve died in a sudden blaze of failure. Instead The Simpsons (arguably) slipped a little, while a heroic staff juggled writing the show and nerfing a middle manager.

Greater curses abound in the lives of The Pitts’ main actors. The luckiest performer is the family’s daughter, played by Lizzy Caplan. She did The Pitts before she was famous, and after she did the much better show Freaks And Geeks. Lizzy Caplan’s doing great. Lizzy Caplan also might be why this show never vanishes. If one thing protects The Pitts (2003) from disappearing beneath the SEO of The Pitt (2025), it’s a Vichy late night TV host bothering their guest Lizzy Caplan about it in the 2030s.

Her TV sibling didn’t get off much better. David Henrie plays her tweenage brother. Professionally, he never escaped making this face.

David Henrie might play the role of “tweenage brother” until he is 100 years old. With one baffling Reaganesque exception, his entire IMDb is irritating boys. On the plus side, Looking Like That meant The Pitts could not derail this lucrative destiny. After The Pitts, he got his real start on Wizards Of Waverly Place. If his follow-up role of the exact same role is any indication, Henrie’s start is a flat circle.

The teens are fine. The teens are not why this show is unwatchably cursed. Greater curses spring from the actors playing the parents. The less chilling curse is that the father is arguably the most famous actor in Hollywood Pedophile Dad Characters history.

The only clever thing about The Pitts is this casting choice. Dylan Baker is the perfect pick for its dad. His face is like a caricature of “wholesome.” He’s also a good guy in real life, according to this news story about him risking his life to try to save his neighbor from a fire. We should all be nice to Dylan Baker. And yet… that face. It’s creepy. It’s so creepy, Google claims this is his headshot:

That face is best-known for playing a pedo in a Todd Solondz movie. Second-most famous role: an evil S&M freak who’s the least-goodest client of The Good Wife. Whoever cast The Pitts filled the dad role too well. People either saw Dylan Baker and thought “that pedophile!!!” or saw him and thought “I wonder if that guy = pedophile?”.

Worst of all: Kellie Waymire. She’s the gal playing the mom in this sitcom. Throughout her work on The Pitts, as her showrunner yukked it up about how funny it would be if bad things happened to a family, Kellie Waymire teetered on the precipice of garden variety untimely death.

Life is hard. Existence is a gift. Your chosen philosopher or faith says that better than I can. Their wisdom must carry you through the sad truth of 2003 Kellie Waymire’s imminent fame. In the same year or so when Waymire played Mrs. Pitt, she guest-starred on Friends and Star Trek Enterprise and NYPD Blue and Six Feet Under. She also broke into Hollywood the legit way (as a theater actor), by playing a role far darker than anything The Pitts would dare (a dog whose human adopter might want to have sex with her). I wish I didn’t learn what a bangable dog she played by reading her obituary.

When you watch The Pitts, you don’t watch a TV show. You watch a live feed of Kellie Waymire’s bum ticker bumming out. You also watch a show’s crappiness win a race against that coronary. Fox ended production long before bereavement could derail production. And when I think about that fact, I discover a profound missed opportunity. I progress from sadness about Waymire’s fate, to a renewed disgust with the Scullys. If The Pitts were a watchable show, it could’ve become Hollywood’s funniest sincere tribute to a performer’s untimely passing. Imagine it. Think about it. The premise is that the family is cursed. Their actor died in real life. That’s a unique opportunity. Spin that into an endless monument to her memory! Kellie Waymire’s death should’ve sparked a Simpsons length run for a sitcom where every character dies, and gets swapped out for a different actor, into eternity. Huge stars could sign up for a short run as the latest, greatest family member who’ll kick the bucket. We should be watching Season 22 of The Pitts, where Matt LeBlanc marries into this charnel house, because Ray Romano got devoured by hellspawn on his bizarre combo honeymoon with Erinn Hayes / tropical funeral for Kirsten Dunst. Meanwhile, the bluish Star Wars Force Ghost of Lizzy Caplan cackles in the corner. I want to live in that artistic universe. I want America to have a brilliant sitcom that’s brave about death, honest about the inevitability of change, and an intrinsic celebration of the life of its first lead actress. Instead, we got cosseted boomers reheating 1980s stand-up and wasting a CGI budget. Go to hell, Mike Scully – and write your Hell Fare off your taxes as a research trip for a Pitts revival on Peacock.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Ozzie Olin. Like actually this time! Alex said so in the article. What a cool person. Thanks Ozzie! Also he knows spider-man but is cool about it and almost never name drops.