Undateable Isn't Good, But Only Chris D'Elia Makes It Unwatchable

One thing I've come to count on in my many years of TV is the excellent taste of one Bill Lawrence. From my beloved Scrubs to the uneven but generally likable Cougar Town to the recently departed Surviving Jack, Lawrence has produced shows that evince the right ratio of inspired goofiness to real heart. (In the case of what is arguably the very most important piece of work with his name on it -- Clone High -- it's 100% goofiness, and thank god.) So I might have been inclined to give a fair shot to Undateable, on which Lawrence is an executive producer, even though it's a multi-cam network sitcom getting burned off two at a time over the summer. However, none of those hurdles, which I'd have been willing to leap, is as big as my antipathy for the show's lead: the Dealbreaker Chris D'Elia.

If you know D'Elia at all, it's probably from seeing his greasy mug and greasier hair on all those billboards before the first season of Whitney. And while that show was profoundly Not For Me, I don't hold him responsible; though I'm sure he had some "creative" input, he was just a hired hand. What I do hold him responsible for is his shitty standup -- which is offensive, but not even so offensive that you can get worked up about it; it's just obvious, dumb, and lazy. Here, if you care to squander a few minutes of your life, is some proof. Asian girls don't laugh right!

The only thing scarier than black gangsters are Germans!

Undateable allows D'Elia's to do a variation on these racial "jokes" -- guests we don't see at a party D'Elia's Danny attends with his sister Leslie are shorthanded as "Asian Zac Efron" and "white Rihanna" -- but mostly, it sets him up as an expert pickup artist. After Danny's (male) roommate Shannon moves out to get "buried," Danny's hilarious Freudian "slip" for "married," he acquires a new one in Justin, the owner of a barely successful bar and the least romantically hopeless of his group of beta-male buddies, all of whom Danny then takes on to mentor in the ways of ladies -- and men, in the case of Brett, a thirtysomething who apparently just came out a couple of weeks before the events of the pilot; it wouldn't surprise me if the addition of his character, who applies Danny's lessons in the pursuit of men, came as a note to make Danny's advice seem less...well, I'll say "predatory" and trust that you know what I mean.

For the character of Danny to work would require him to display some kind of twinkle or charm to cut the acid in his churning potion of woman-tricking rules and techniques. The reason we all got on board with Barney Stinson, for example, inasmuch as we did, is because he generally treated "the game" as an actual game, which was fun but fairly silly. But it's difficult to accept that Danny's rap even works on the women he's pursuing, never mind that it could be transferable to the other dudes he's taken under his wing. He's just such a creep. If Undateable had the balls to make Danny a true, British sitcom-style unhero who's impossible to root for, awkwardly running game on women without any success ever, then maybe casting the hairy-yet-lizardy D'Elia would have worked. But the show's last-second hugging and learning moments -- at the end of the first episode, he says he wishes he were ready for marriage like all his old buddies are; in the second, he makes a symbolic gesture to prove he has Justin's back -- fall flat: it's impossible to humanize Danny because D'Elia is not believable as a...human.

So: this is where we part ways, Bill Lawrence. I like Enlisted's Ron Funches in the supporting role of Shelly, and Justin even shows moments of J.D. Dorian spark that might have worked on me. But Chris D'Elia is and always will be a Dealbreaker -- now more than ever.