It's hard to judge just how dreadful the doomed "How to Be a Gentleman" was, but I really love Dave Foley in it

Early in the opening scene of the pilot episode of How to Be a Gentleman, Marquis magazine editor Jerry (Dave Foley) told "manners columnist" Andrew (played by series creator David Hornsby) the, er, "good news" about the sale of the magazine.

"You know where the new management is coming from. You see your column as an honest portrayal of the human condition. They see it as just words that keep the sex-pill ads from hitting each other."

-- Jerry to Andrew, in Saturday night's episode,
"How to Attend Your Ex-Fiancée's Wedding"

by Ken

I suppose the question I've posed in the head is academic now that I see:

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

CBS Shuts Down Production on 'How to Be a Gentleman'
On Friday, the network moved the struggling comedy to Saturdays, replacing it with veteran sitcom “Rules of Engagement.”

October 8 3:25 PM PDT 10/8/2011 by Philiana Ng

One day after CBS moved struggling freshman comedy How to Be a Gentleman to Saturdays, production on the half-hour series has ceased.

This means the David Hornsby-Kevin Dillon series will air the remaining seven episodes in its new home beginning Saturday, Oct. 15 at 8:30 p.m. following encores of Two and a Half Men.

When Gentleman premiered in the enviable post-The Big Bang Theory slot on Sept. 29, it was down a substantial 33 percent in the all-important adults 18-49 demo compared to $#*! My Dad Says the previous year. ($#*! was canceled after one season.) In Week 2, Gentleman sank another 7 percent.

Starting Thursday, Oct. 20, Rules of Engagement will launch its sixth season in Gentleman’s old 8:30 p.m. home.

Clearly it didn't take viewers long to decide how terrible the show is. (And thanks to Philiana Ng for reminding us of $#*! My Dad Says, surely the worst show title in the history of TV, and possibly any medium. It's a title, after all, that you can't possibly say. Go ahead, try it. See? Can't be done.)

And yet, while I can't honestly recommend that you set the DVR for those remaining episodes playing out on Saturday nights, I may actually do so myself. First, because I'm still not sure that the show is, or maybe that it had to be, as bad as it is. Second, and more important, in his limited air time, Dave Foley as the utterly unapologetic 50-year-old job whore seems to me somewhere between incandescent and sublime.

You might think that the show is making fun of the "hip" young new ownership of the magazine, but in fact most of its heart -- or such heart as it has -- is lined up squarely on the side of the troglodytes, as represented by Andrew's found-again high school nemesis Bert (Kevin Dillon, coming off his long run as Vincent Chase's lunkhead brother Johnny on Entourage), now a gym owner, who somehow insinuates himself into Andrew's life as the guy who's going to teach him to be a real man. Bert to Andrew: "You know everything about being a gentleman, but nothing about being a man. And you have to believe that whoever at CBS thought this show might have a ghost of a whisper of a prayer of finding an audience was surely counting on a proactive pro-moron viewership.

I was startled to discover, after viewing all three episodes to date, that the series was in fact concocted by David Hornsby, our "gentleman," Andrew. And you figure that there must have been some behind-the-scenes back-and-forth with the network executives as to whether they shouldn't hire an actual actor for the role. Usually I side with the enterprising actor who's written himself a presumably plum role, but in this case . . . . No doubt it would have been tricky to hire an actual actor, because Andrew is such a nothing that a real actor, or even somebody just hired to look nice, would have had too much personality, or personishness, for the nothing that is Andrew. And make no mistake, poor David H as Andrew is such a washed-out dweeb that it's really as if there was nobody at all on-screen, except that nobody wouldn't keep making those annoying noises that our David does, leaving at least this viewer whining, or sometimes screaming, "Please, make it stop!"

Normally I wouldn't bother you (or myself) with such cartoonishness. What interests me about it, though, is that it isn't because they're unidimensional clichés that Andrew and Bert are so unbearable. After all, people of the mindless crudity of Bert not only exist in real life but abound, and I'm sure there are people in real life who cling to the mindless, er, "values" of Andrew. And I don't see why it should be impossible to create comic drama about them. But the thing is, you would have to make your fictional versions interesting -- at least interesting enough to cause a certain number of viewers to wish to have them make repeat appearances on their TVs.

And I'm not even sure the problem is the writing. If the acting and directing are as off the mark as I think they are in How to Be a Gentleman, it's not easy for me to hear the writing. And as I was re-viewing the opening clip from the pilot, and finding Dave Foley if anything even more brilliant than I had the first time through, I realized that a different actor might well have made Jerry just as intolerable as Andrew and Bert. Maybe Foley's work won't strike other viewers the same way. However, I not only believe 100 percent in Jerry's reality but am hopelessly delighted by the "I'm holding onto this job as tight as I can" ferocity of it.

I don't know how representative an example this is, but in Saturday night's episode, built around the issue of Andrew attending his ex-fiancée's wedding. (Like we haven't seen that one before, sometimes even by people who had it in their heads to entertain us viewers.) A running joke was that the wedding reception was going to have a mashed-potato bar, a prospect that was apparently supposed to be (a) exciting to the characters and (b) amusing to the viewer. I don't know, are there really mashed-potato bars? Is this some new fad I've missed? Regardless, why would it be funny -- if the characters all seem to think it's a fabulous idea? And yet, in its final iteration, I thought it was pretty darned funny. One of the plot devices the writers have been falling back on is Jerry getting Andrew to rewrite columns, which apparently have previously been drawn from his real-life experiences (being, you know, a gentleman in such a, you know, ungentlemanly world), but now as Andrew begins to embellish, Jerry no longer knows when the stories are true and when they aren't, and is quite disappointed to discover that Andrew's newly written account of his triumph at the wedding wasn't exactly true. Why is he disappointed? "I knew," he says, "that mashed-potato bar sounded too good to be true." And this time it's funny precisely because Foley's Jerry has stakes; he really feels deprived at the thought that there wasn't a mashed-potato bar.

Okay, it's not a laff-riot type of line, and probably not even funny enough to make the kind of production over it I just did. But it's a line that's funny because it grows out of a believable urgency for the character. And again, I'm not sure that another actor would have gotten that laugh, which I don't think can happen unless the actor makes us feel Jerry's forlorn hope that while there may not be a Santa Claus or an Easter bunny (let alone a sensible magazine publisher), there might actually be a mashed-potato bar.

The other regular cast members aren't hopeless: Mary Lynn Rajskub as Andrew's smart(ish)-aleck sister; Rhys Darby -- fondly remembered as the clueless New Zealander consular official-slash-band manager from Flight of the Conchords -- reprising his clueless New Zealander persona as Andrew's brother-in-law; and Nancy Lenehan as Andrew's prickly mother. But they're all stuck attempting the simultaneously easy-as-pie and utterly impossible task of making a laugh machine laugh. (I'm aware that the laughs may in fact be coming from a "live studio audience," but the fact is that in modern TV, live studio audiences are in fact less believable than well-crafted laugh tracks, since under the hothouse conditions of a studio taping, audience members apparently enjoying their first outing since being shut up in the group home are pressured to make un-human-sounding laugh-type noises at the slightest provocation, or even no provocation at all, and the results can then be amped up so that the only reasonable response is, "What the eff are those effing shut-ins chortling about?"

And still, to go back to my question about whether the show absolutely had to be as terrible as everyone seems to believe it is, every now and then there's a moment. Like in the wedding episode, when real man Bert sets his sights on the hot-babe wedding planner, and quite believably gets nowhere with her, until something about him strikes a chord somewhere in her.

WEDDING PLANNER: I can't tell if you're charming and adorable or a borderline sociopath.
BERT: Yeah, I get that a lot.

To me, that's actually kind of amusing, and also gives us something to relate to in both characters, including how they see themselves -- not at all a bad yield for 18 words. What's more, that exchange sets up this ensuing one:

WEDDING PLANNER: For some self-destructive reason you intrigue me.
BERT: I get that a lot too.

That's Kevin Dillon as Bert at right and . . . well, there doesn't seem to be anybody at all at left, is there? (At least in a still photo we don't have to listen to that person who isn't there.)

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