Did anyone else watch Dog Bites Man on Comedy Central last night?
The show was actually very smart, and well done, and with the exception of Zach Galifianakis' disappointing one-note turn as a director who's constantly in the bathroom, it was hilarious.
But I don't blame you if you didn't watch it. After looking at the terrible ads for it plastered on every surface of New York City (subway, scaffolding, and, yes, even sidewalk), I wasn't going to watch it either. (My appreciation for AD Miles and Matt Walsh won out in the end…)
What's weird is that the quality of the show was inversely proportionate to how awful the ads were.
Here are a few of the not even comically unfunny taglines that I saw in the week leading up to the show's premiere:
Dog Bites Man: The News: They break it, you buy it. Dog Bites Man: News travels fast. Unless they're stuck in traffic.
That last one makes me scrunch up my face like I'm eating a peice of spoiled fruit every time I see it. And then there was that God awful series of Dog Bites Man subway ads where a quote was attributed to each character. I don't know which ad guy he pissed off to get it, but Zach Galifianakis' quote was: "When it comes to news, I have a motto. It's in Latin, and I don't understand what it means, but I like it."
Ugh. Putting that in a subway car, where you know that people have no choice but to stare at it over and over again, hoping that it will change, or disappear, or maybe suddenly become funny, is basically torture.
So, dear readers, here are my questions: Did anyone else like this show? And, why does advertising make everything, no matter how good, look like crap?