Baby Bob

(stepping up on my soapbox) I'm sick to death of all these TV shows, commercials and movies where babies act like "adults"! Baby Bob certainly takes the cake! I saw this show one day while flipping through the channels and was horrified to find Elliott Gould and Adam Arkin sinking to their career lows. Just because we have the CGI technology to make a baby talk doesn't mean we need to base an entire series around it, and a darn spooky looking one at that! Talking, dancing, singing babies are NOT cute and don't deserve a sitcom!!!

Talking Baby pictures are, almost by definition, atrociously bad, because they HAVE to be. I tuned this one for no other reason than to see how atrociously bad these things will continue to be. Waddayaknow---actually entertaining and funny. Primarily because Bob doesn't really talk very much, and the action goes on around the presence of Bob in the lives of his parents, including warmly-shaped mom, who, at least in the first episode, in her wardrobe, was an incredible feast for the eyes. This is really just an average sit-com, but a relief to find out that a talking-baby picture can somehow be bootsrapped up to average. As a talking baby pic, the head-and-shoulders runner-up to the Mercedes "He's my dad" commercial of several years ago.

Having babies talk on shows isn't really an original premise, but then neither are shows like "Friends" or "According to Jim", and they are successful. But this show is creepy and devoid of humour. Especially when the baby was ogling his mom. Weird.

This show was great. And it was canceled only a little into the first season. If it wasn't developed enough, or the plot wasn't used to it's fullest, it's because the show wasn't given the chance. Often, first seasons are just finding their footing and aren't the best seasons. Later seasons, if this show hadn't been canceled so early would have gotten better. The whole idea of a baby talking was very funny. And the things the baby said- even funnier. And the parents having to hide the fact that their baby was talking, could have been very funny for a long time too.

Around 1999 or 2000,I believe it was the DEll computer company had a marketing campaign for computers featuring an adorable(what else?)baby boy talking with an adult male voice,complete with computer animated mouth movement to make this look "Authentic". THis commercial line was so successful,evidentally,that some other companies(Among them,the Quizno's sandwich company)employed this character,named Bob,to do their ads.

Around 2001,some programming execs at CBS were either approached by somebody or came up with on their own a sitcom set around the baby named Bob. Hence this show.

I won't go into a content criticism of this show,since A)it seems pretty well documented through the series of comments on this show that my critiques would be echoed by myself as well. All I will say on that is that from the few shows I saw this series would've been considered retro in the 1960s,and that's generally not going to cut it where TV audiences are now and B)enough years have passed since this was released and then mercifully pulled that I wouldn't have much fresh memory to go on to make a better critique.

Suffice it to say that all(or most)involved--Adam Arkin,Joely FIsher,Elliott Gould,Holland CArter,maybe even Baby Bob and his voice,KEn HUdson Campbell--have gone on to better work since. I should hope so,anyway. A cute commercial DOES NOT merit a TV series.

THen again,I haven't caught ABC's "CAvemen",so who knows.