Animal Practice never had any reason to exist

(I have watched a lot of crap TV. I actually love it. But while y’all watch these high-reaching shows about meth dealers or ad guys or dragons or whatever, I watch silliness. This is Remember the Fallen, where I reminisce on some of the awful, awful dearly departed shows of our collective past.)

The people who make TV have certain actors or actresses they really want to make happen. David Walton was the lead in about 473 different sitcoms in, like, five years, as they tried so hard to make him be something.

Before him, there was Justin Kirk. A master at smarm, Kirk starred in APB and Weeds and a couple other shows. And there was Tyler Labine. You might know him from Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, easily the highlight of his career, but overall he’s made a life as the schlubby comic relief in sad little short-lived shows like Mad Love and Sons of Tucson. And there was JoAnna Garcia Swisher, who was a regular in Reba for a while and ever since has had three- or four-episode stints as the main character’s love interest in a bunch of shows.

But briefly in 2012, we got all three of them ether for six episodes of what by all rights should get re-aired every summer to show people what is possible, in the short-lived sitcom Animal Practice.

Do you remember Animal Practice? Kirk played the veterinarian leader of a … you know what? It’s better if I just show you:

Did you get that? He’s basically House, but for animals, and with Kirk holding about 4% of the charm and charisma of Hugh Laurie. And there’s a monkey.

Most famously, the show premiered at the end of one of the days of NBC’s Summer Olympics coverage. If you recall (you probably don’t, but you will), the coverage of those Olympics, in London, drew a lot of criticism because NBC ran a lot of the stuff on tape delay and heavily edited … including the closing ceremonies, for some reason, with Animal Practice debuting at the end of that. And most egregiously, they interrupted their pre-taped and abridged closing ceremonies to get to this sitcom. Pissing off hundreds of millions (or whatever) of Olympics fans to debut a sitcom with a monkey character is just a record-settingly bad strategy.

Which ignores the fact that the show was so bad. Look at that promo again. The very first thing they want you to see about their show is “Hey, here’s a cat attempting suicide.” Before you know the characters, know the jokes, know anything, you find out cat near-death.

And what’s the best joke in there? The monkey throwing pill bottles at Matt Walsh? The funky-looking nurse commenting on the sure-to-be-amazing sexual tension between the two leads? The best joke I can find in that two-minute promo is the schlubby sidekick trying to flirt with a girl by telling her her dog will die. Hilarity.

Trust me when I tell you, the show itself did not get better from there. But you know that. It lasted six episodes. Obviously it wasn’t good. Can we instead talk about how such a show came to exist in the first place?

(As an aside: What’s going on with the black lady’s hair in that promo? Did they just over-Photoshop it? I’m so confused.)

Justin Kirk is attractive enough. (I guess? I struggle gauging men’s attractiveness.) He also has all the charisma of a clever parking meter. That can work in an ensemble, when he can bounce off funnier or more active counterparts. They put that chunk of wood opposite a monkey. What was the elevator pitch? “So he’s an irascible vet with a monkey who he loves.” I would say that would pique interest for as long as it took the audience to realize “vet” means “veterinarian” and not “veteran.” But once that’s resolved, how does a producer let that pitch get to the second floor, let alone the top?  

Some bad shows are so-bad-they’re-good, which can be a selling point. I loved me some Scorpion, some Under the Dome. This show was a trainwreck in a much less exciting sense. It was a bad show, and I will never understand why it existed. It was a poorly executed show that was done no favors at all by its network, set up for complete failure from the start.

But we’ll always have the monkey.