At a Loss (HAHAHAHAHA!)

The Winner, Fox's new half-hour sitcom airing Sunday nights, stars Rob Cordry (The Daily Show) as Glen Abbott, a 32-year-old late bloomer who wakes up one day in his childhood bedroom in his parents' house and decides its finally time for him to experience adolescence. It's 1994, so Abbott can't just get online to learn about fornication (as he calls it). The show is narrated by Glen's more successful future self, though it's unclear how Glen eventually succeeded, nor why he cares to tell us this story about his embarrassing past.

The Winner was created by Seth MacFarlane and Rick Blitt, and Fox is eager to bill it as a live-action version of The Family Guy. Even the website asks, "Is Glen Abott Stewie Griffin grown up?"

Hard to say. I have more pressing questions regarding The Winner. For starters, who are those people laughing too loudly and too hard at every single line of the show? Unfortunately, the laugh track is the most memorable thing about the show. You cannot watch an episode without wanting to reach into the screen and MAKE THE LAMBS STOP LAUGHING. Maniacally. At everything. For, like, twice as long as is merited, if it's even merited at all.

At first, I thought I must have just adapted to watching sitcoms without laugh tracks. And then I realized, no, this is just the worst laugh track ever. I can watch an episode of Friends in syndication without even noticing the canned laughs. But on The Winner, it's front and center, stepping on punch lines, distracting from sight gags, and chewing up the scenery.

Maybe the guy who laid in the laugh track hates Rob Cordry, actors generally, sitcoms, the English language, television, and me. It's also possible that the laughs are an intentional choice by MacFarlane and Blitt to mimic the cookie-cutter quality of the early 90s sitcom (the sets and costumes all have a bland, generic quality that starts to look purposeful once the references to Wings start rolling in). If this is the case, it doesn't work. It sounds more like the show received a poor response from the test audience, prompting Fox to punch it up in post production.

Even the few moderately funny lines fail to live up to the outsized guffaws forced into every spare second of dead air. When Abbott told a massage parlor hooker, "The movies are right -- you girls really do have hearts of gold!" I would have chuckled, but the laugh track stepped all over my line, too.

Laugh track aside, the real problem with The Winner is that Abbott just isn't a very sympathetic protagonist. Unlike Steve Carell's character in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, we don't understand how Abbott got to be 32 without learning even the basics about sex and relationships. He comes across as stubbornly obtuse (or maybe severely learning disabled), instead of just shy, awkward or embarrassed.

I don't mean to discredit Cordry as a comedic talent. He does his best with the material, but the script is too rigid and strange to give him much latitude. More importantly, there is no one for him to play with. He needs some savvy, observant, and slightly mean-spirited friends, relatives, or neighbors to tease and educate him and make him seem more like an actual person. Without them, he's about human as those lunatics on the laugh track.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

HA!