Allen Gregory and dislikable characters

Allen Gregory-I tend to give a fairly generous bye to anything appearing on TV that either looks remotely entertaining even if it might have some rough spots. Life is too short not to enjoy a good TV show if you see one. In some cases, even if a show isn't entertaining me in the moment, I might be intrigued because it has a solid enough framework. In this case, you can envision a network of characters or scenarios so that if the writing got sharper it wouldn't be very hard for the show to hit its stride. Off the top of my head, "Parks and Recreation" or "American Dad" are great examples of this.

"Allen Gregory" is a very rare case of the opposite. I was looking forward to this show after seeing a 3-minute clip of a 7-year old boy genius who despite having lobbied for fuel cell technology on Capitol Hill, and having a circle of friends that includes Sandy Bullock, he quickly becomes an ordinary outcast when he transfers to a new school. At this point, the show has completely fallen apart and it's shown that despite occasional moments of funniness, we are ultimately left with unlikable characters that we don't want to spend time with.

Someone asked an intriguing question on a message board about why Allen Gregory being a dislikable character detracts from the show if that's not the case with many characters in movies and tv shows who are enjoyable to watch even if they're not likable people.

For one, I personally prefer likable characters and can even find redeeming qualities in traditionally dislikable characters (which suddenly strikes me as good fodder for a seperate post). More importantly, however, likable characters have to be interesting in some way or another.

Allen Gregory had promise to be interesting because of its tension. It would be like if Stewie on "Family Guy" were ever confronted with the reality that maybe he wasn't one of the world's smartest and most charismatic people and forced to deal with that reality alongside other kids who could see right through him everyday. "Gregory" doesn't capitalize on that because the main character rarely acknowledges reality. His teacher, Gina (Leslie Mann, a faaaar more ideal love interest than the 60-year old Principal Gottlieb who induces more of a gross-out effect than anything else), doesn't seem to be enabling his delusions but the interaction between the two has been very limited.

Instead, what we have is Allen being given a swirlie, passing it off as something that he voluntarily chose to do and being enabled in his behavior by his dad and a school director who appreciates the money from the Gregory-DeLongpree name too much. Conflicts aren't dealt with in any interesting or meaty way.

Which brings us to another major problem: Not only is Allen Gregory delusional and emotionally abusive to those around him, but so is his biological dad (voiced by French Stuart). The father character is so discaple that, as his backstory (yet to be fully explained) he coerced a straight man with a wife and kids to be his husband (sex included).

The end result of this is that the scenes with the family of four have a sort of wierd dynamic where two people are the family scapegoat and the dialogue just doesn't flow as well. It's not convincing that two people would be able to have so much power that they can intimidate the other two into into just being quiet scapegoats.

It works much better if you have three or more people and one guy who's the punching back. This is what most shows do: see Meg on "Family Guy", Jerry on "Parks and Recreation", Kimmy Gibbler on "Full House", Roy Biggins on "Wings", etc.

So essentially, what we have is a few good jokes in the middle of a train wreck.