You know when that feeling when you're older and your best days are just about behind you, and your family plans on sending you to a home? No. Oh right, you're not there yet. Well, if you watch The Golden Girls, and listen to Sophia share horror stories about an attrocious retirement facility she previously lived in, Shady Pines? Well, this series about IS TWENTY TIMES WORSE.
The show I'm talking about is Assisted Living, the new sitcom from Tyler Perry, a... Well, you can call him black triple-threat and visionary, while I'll call him wheel-spinning, uncreative, overpaid, underwrought chitlin-circuit-reviving hack.
In Assisted Living, a man named Jeremy and his family (wife Leah, son Phillip, and daughter Sandra) travel from Chicago to suburban Georgia to meet up with his grandfather Vinny at a rundown shithole of an assisted living facility. There, he asks to pick up his inheritance from his late grandmother, only to find out that his hook-handed hellraiser of a elder relative stole the inheritance to purchase the facility (where the other patients have either died off or he may have killed them one by one; I can't tell because the dialogue made me feel like I would die off myself) and use it as his new home ... or tourist trap (He reminds me of Grunkle Stanley Pines from Gravity Falls, but not as funny, lovable, compelling, interesting or even redeemable [read: not at all]), leaving our main character furious and his family shocked. At the end of the second episode, after Jeremy walks throughout the place to find dear old grandpa (one joke called it an abyss; and I'll link to that negatively in a minute) and I say through the kids being talkative, disrespectful brats and the mom making the joke of threatening her kin with child abuse even less funny than it already is (not at all), our "hero" finally tries to reason with Captain Hook-if he finally stopped chasing after Peter Pan and lived his days being unfunny-and-unevil about why he took the inheritance money to buy what he calls home (and I call Satan's waiting room). He just couldn't be reasoned with so we end with a fight to the death-- I mean, for the inheritance. Grandpa hits grandson? No sell. Grandson hits grandpa? Pow! right in the kisser. Grandson runs like Greg Wulliger (aka like a bitch) and end scene.
All of this may sound interesting considering the guy that gave you the Madea films. But no... it's not. Assisted Living is like a retirement home: horrible, run down, negligible, and has this pray-for-death-as-its-better-than-this-treatment.
The writing is God-awful! Every joke Perry gives us is weak, cringe, exaggerated (thanks to the loud, overused laugh track), and featured modern-age stereotypes and behavior that send us back to the days of Amos n Andy (and I don't mean the TV show with actual black actors, I mean the radio show with its creators trying and failing to sound like black actors - they're white! Ahh, radio. Such a blessing to get away with racist minstrel shit on a national scale). Add to that, the entire dialogue takes forever to get to the point of why, when, where or how a certain plotline has taken place. Not a minute goes by without half a page worth of one or two characters saying a joke or speaking back and forth about something - a person, place, thing or memory. And either the jokes do not land (leading to a garbage punchline) or story or item that is even less interesting or compelling than what we started with. Nothing about the writing was good or even attentive (and Perry isn't exactly Jordan Peele or Ava Duvernay or Bryan Fuller or Christopher Nolan, but at least he gets the work done half of the time). And I feel like I've lost an hour of my life I damn well know I regretfully won't get back because of it. Maybe I should live there as it's usually a place I know can't take me back to the best days of it. Hopefully, I won't bump into any of these people. And speaking of...
The characters are unlikable. Each and every one of the family featured here have nothing to like, fascinate, be amused by or enjoy.
- Jeremy is dull, uninteresting and bland. Every line his actor speaks has no emotion or humor. But I can tolerate him over the rest.
- His wife Leah is sometimes a sensible, caring mom and sometimes an approximation of the stock black TV mom in predominantly black sitcoms. No not like Clair Huxtable or Harriette Winslow, but those moms who yells loud at their children when they act up and sometimes insults them and threatens child abuse on them for even the most minor of offenses, like Nikki Parker or Rochelle Rock. You know for laughs. (But at least, those two are written much better and funnier.) Apparently Perry always sees this as funny like Vince McMahon always finds toilet hunor, mental dysfunction and racist caricatures funny.
Their kids Sandra and Phillip are caricatures of TV kids and real life black kids today. Phone strapped to the hip, smart-ass mouths to their families, more knowledge and interest in ghetto hoodrat culture like Worldstar, This is 50, Shade Room, black Instagram and black Twitter (or if the teens are white - Starbucks, record stores, dry bars, Instagram and Twitter) (I may be exaggerating a bit). This is what Perry thinks kids are like today. He's not 100% wrong but still.
- And finally tthere's Vinny. He's exactly what an old person thinks they are: cool, in-touch, funny and beloved -- but clinging onto what they thought was cool, in touch and funny years ago. Hell, I'll even say he's what white people thought black people were when Birth of a Nation came out (except the raping, pillaging and buckwilding of course). He's loud, assertive, ignorant, bitter, foolish, prideful and uncaring -- all those things old people who weren't loved and cared for as a child turned out as in their wanting years. These would be when I would say that even good characters can have these traits when written right. But he's not a good character and he's not written right, and those bad traits are just the start. Every time he speaks, it feels like twice the time it takes to go to the bathroom and back, his antics are stupid and selfish (buying the house with Jeremy's inheritance is the start of his warfare) and his hook for a right hand feels like a prop for shitty jokes than a heartbreaking aftermath of the loss of an important appendage. If he was my grandfather, the moment I hear that he'd stolen my inheritance from me to buy a shitty, dilapidated Indian burial ground of a house, I'd use his cupholder of a hook and kill him with it, then bury him in the graveyard across the street later that night while no one noticed (yes, it's mentioned that there is a graveyard built opposite the house. Not important.)
The show also has horrid sound mixing - the cast has an echo when they talk and the laugh track is somehow louder, maybe to mask the trite jokes and prodding dialogue; the lighting is too bright and flushed; the sets are too on the nose to be good; and the writing leaves a bad taste in my mouth (sadly not the cause of my acid reflux). Half the script features actual cursing - but BET censured them all, making the show much more empty and much more unintentionally humorous. You can hear half-second silence in many places for the whole run. If the writers or the network can't make up their minds on if we have to hear the word "shit" or "bitch" in the show, then what's the point?
Duing the time it took for the next scene to end, the scene after the credits revealed that the family will live in the place and possibly open it as new retirement home. I would never send even a family member I hate there. I'd just sell it for whatever it can be sold for (to renovate then flip or destroy) and buy an apartment then bathe myself with the rest. Much better than to live with my ugly-hearted thieving grandpa, my wife whom I probably married for her body, and two smart-mouth ingrates of kids who look and sound like carbon copies of Andre Jr. and Zoey Johnson (but not as funny, likable or compelling [sorry, not at all]) or two other characters from another mostly horribly unfunny show. Leroy Brown and Cora Simmons from Meet the Browns are also featured in Assisted Living, but so far do not appear despite BET hyping the hell out of their appearances in ads for the show. And if you watch House of Payne (which returned after 8 years earlier in the evening and is at least better because it's well known despite the same horrible pacing and NASCAR-circling writing), one character is mentioned a lot but doesn't appear throughout the first two episodes, along with two others. The same thing is present with Brown and Cora (get it? Characters not being present is present in these shows? Ha, irony). It felt like a copout and a letdown. It's like the producers did this intentionally to draw us into the show and this damn family to wait for them then keep us hooked just enough to wait for the next episodes for it to finally happen. If so, hopefully it's not the last episodes. But you won't catch me watching. Maybe the one with Brown and Cora actually appear then afterward wish that Meet the Browns returned instead. Sure, that sucks too (and even more than I was younger and stupider too), but at least I know that show much more.
Assisted Living is a horrible sitcom. Then again, it's Tyler Perry; what did you expect? If you're a Diehard Perry fan, this may be for you. Everyone else, AVOID THIS LIKE THE RETIREMENT HOME YOU WOULDN'T WANT TO BE TRICKED INTO STAYING IN!
I'm Andrew... and you're welcome.