Blue Collar TV, featuring Jeff Foxworthy, Larry the Cable Guy, and Bill Engvall, is a new show on the WB this season. Alternating between almost funny and practically too stupid to watch, it appeals to the same target audience as Foxworthy's stand-up material. There must be people who enjoy long lists of things that rednecks do, but I'm not in that category, and this show did not appeal to me either.
The show's setup is fairly typical: an opening monologue, followed by a bunch of skits. The first skit of the pilot takes place in a restaurant; the waitress comes to the table and gives the family their food. The dad asks what's on his turkey, and she describes the sauce. He asks, "Where's the gravy?" to which she responds, "We don't have gravy here." The family becomes hysterical over this. Jeff Foxworthy steps in, and goes into a commercial dialog about the House of Gravy, where everything (including the dessert!) is drenched in gravy. Potatoes, chicken, steak, vegetarian medley — everything comes with a copious amount of gravy dumped right on top of it. To drink? Iced gravy.
For those of you who are thinking, "This is disgusting," yes, you are correct. However, "House of Gravy" actually seemed funny in comparison to the rest of the skits. In "Big Kids," the trio act like kids in the back of a car, the youngest one pees all over the place, they hit each other, and then the parents take them out for ice cream. This is apparently uproarious, because the audience is practically dying of laughter. I thought the commercial break was more entertaining.
Later, Foxworthy takes a look at the Redneck Dictionary, specifically at the word "handsome." The joke? "When you're done with that suntan lotion, can you hand some over to me?" In another episode, he defines fascinate: "My shirt has ten buttons, but I can only fasten eight."
I'd say this show will last two seasons at the very most, but then again, I thought Reba wouldn't make it through the first season, and that's still on the air, so maybe I'll be wrong again. We shall see.