Heil Honey I'm Home!

There is quite a lot to be said about this series and I'm gonig to try to be as fair as possible.

The main basis of this show is combining two different scenarios, one being Nazi Germany and an American sitcom. Both situations are very different and therefore trying to merge them did not work in my honest opinion. Sitcoms which make light of wartime situations are not uncommon. Examples include Allo Allo, Goodnight Sweetheart and Blackadder Goes Forth were successful despite using a theme which was quite sensitive.

Heil Honey I'm home, just does not appear to have the same sort of steam. Quite frankly Hitler became so Americanised that he was quite similar to Oliver Hardy.

I can't blame the people involved for trying to think of a different comical situation which has not been used before. Quite a few Jews were involved in the making of it, so I wouldn't have thought it would have been that bad based on this.

Another interesting fact is that it was shown on a satellite channel in the UK in a time when satellite TV was not very common, therefore how many people actually saw it? What would the general reaction be if it were to be shown today?

I've only seen the first episode and I remember it being quite tedious with very little comical bite. I can't help but wonder what the other episodes were like and seeing them may help form a better opinion on the series as a whole. Considering Hitler was supposed to be plotting to kill his Jewish neighbours though doesn't fill me with much confidence that it would be good to watch (by the way, I'm not Jewish).

I can't blame them for making this programme and I think it has served as a learning curve for programme production (worth watching once for this) but it is a shame that effort was clearly put in but the results were very disastrous.

It's a spoof of 1950's sitcoms starring Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun and their wacky interactions with their Jewish neighbors. Yes, that's the plot. Are you laughing yet?

This was a show that was cancelled after just one showing. It was something that for the longest time existed only as legend and some thought it was never real but some wacky late night sketch show that people had mistaken for an actual sit com. But no, it was real and it was incredibly unfunny.

I'm not the type that says that there are certain subjects you can't make fun of but there is this thing called "tone" and how it's used. The tone for this show is all wrong. I get what it was they were going for. It's a spoof. They use all those tropes from the 1950's with catchphrases, wacky situations and colorful characters but it's just not done properly. This could have worked had they just added a little more subtlety.

But no, it was a failed experiment and it's remembered strictly for the fact it was cancelled after one episode. There are copies floating around out there if you care to see it out of curiosity but don't expect to laugh.

Living in a small Berlin apartment with a Jewish couple for neighbours, the Hitlers (Der Führer Adolf Hitler und Frau Eva Braun-Hitler) bicker and squabble in the years leading up WW2. The single broadcast episode (of 8 made) of the tactless Brit-com is remarkedly unfunny, considering that it is a parody of the easily parodied American sitcoms of the '50s and '60s (especially the shows with a 'gimmick': witches, genies, talking cars, etc.). 'Heil Honey' does a good job of replicating the look and sound of its targets (the predicable jokes, the intrusive laugh track, the canned applause when characters enter the scene, etc.) and with a bit more cleverness might have made for a memorable 15-minute skit on Monty Python or SNL, but as a 30 minute episode of a proposed TV series, it wore itself out by the end of the first act. Needless to say, the show was vilified for making light of Hitler, of antisemitism, and of the events leading up to the war, but, while it no doubt offended many people, 'Heil Honey, I'm Home' was clearly intended as an over-the-top parody not to be taken seriously whatsoever (in the same vein as 'Hogans Heroes', 'The Producers', or any of the multitude of satirical cartoons, songs, movies, etc that came out when the war was still being fought). The only parts I found amusing was the image (referred to but not shown) of Herr Joseph Goebbels at the Berlin airport holding up a cardboard sign reading "Neville Chamberlain" while awaiting the arrival of the British Prime Minister and the show's alternate 'animated opening'. Of interest only of you want to prove to yourself that the show actually existed or to see what 'all the fuss was about' (I first heard of it when surfing 'worst' lists).

OK, so I'm a curious person. I like digging into the rare and infamous stuff, stuff that sticks out, mainly with TV and movies. (For example, the biggest box office bomb, the biggest box office success, the worst TV show ever, yadda yadda yadda). And this show is right up my alley! A few days ago, I was on a Facebook page called "The Rise and Fall of Nickelodeon", which is dedicated to hating the aforementioned kids channel. One post was about Angelica and Susie's Preschool Daze, a Rugrats spin-off that didn't last very long, and focused on the two older kids, Angelica and Susie, in preschool. Now, in the comments section of this post, someone mentioned Australia's Funniest Home Videos. Being the curious person that I am, I looked it up, found out some things about it, and so forth. I also managed to see some suggested searches, one of them being "Heil Honey, I'm Home!". Seeing as how it had nothing to do with my search (or, at least I thought at the time), I decided to take a look. I found out that this show did the impossible, it took something like Hitler and the Third Reich, and turned it into a sitcom. I just had to see this, and I did.

Now, obviously, right from the start, this show is a straight-up parody. It's intention was to mock the old sitcoms of the '50s, '60s, and '70s, which had lots of stupid ideas, but lasted fairly anyway (hence the show's premise). So, I wouldn't be taking this show seriously. When I saw the one and only episode ever aired, I... didn't know what to think of it. I mean, it's kind of funny, but when you look at the historical side, it's just hard to look at. It's based off of an infamous person from history, but it's taken so lightly. I know, it's a parody. But when you base something off of something that actually happened, you just wonder where the history takes place.

I wasn't offended by this show, and I didn't want my time back after watching this show, I just felt pretty blank about it. It has some fairly decent comedy to it, but that's all I can say about it. It just left me with nothing. But it didn't leave the world with nothing. This is known as the most tasteless sitcom of all time. And I get where they're coming from with that. There were other episodes that were shot, but never aired (for obvious reasons.) So, that's Heil Honey, I'm Home! It's something that you truly have to see to believe.

Well, what can be said about "Heil, Honey I'm Home"? Basically, any sitcom about Adolf Hitler living next door to a Jewish couple is destined for disaster from day one. The fact that there were only eight episodes filmed but only one was ever shown says it all. This was made by the old BSB satellite company back in the days when satellite TV was something of a joke in the UK. Looking back at this programme makes it easy to understand why this was the common presumption.

The content of the programme was shocking, especially when it is from the so-called "more understanding" 90's rather than the politically-incorrect 70's. An example of the crass, offensive content is a scene in which Adolf is almost suffering a nervous breakdown. His wife Eva tells him to "think happy thoughts". "Poland!" shouts Hitler, with a devilish grin. And this is funny?!