The McCarthys is a sitcom that revolves around the McCarthys, a Boston family that has more than one quirk. It is also, a terrible show.
I personally watch many sitcoms in my spare time and decided to watch the McCarthys because I heard that it was a “hilarious” show. Before I watched it, I was thoroughly excited and ready to get my laugh on. After five minutes, my expectations were crushed. I didn’t like it at all. My eyes felt like they were going to fall out of my eyes and roll to safety. My eardrums were about to shrivel up and die. The laugh track was too much.
The intro of the show suggests that only one of the characters is the main character, but he isn’t. It’s everyone in the family.
The acting is flawed. Only the father and the two fraternal twins have Boston accents. It’s set in Boston. They should all have the accent. The acting doesn’t have feelings or emotions. When the father was supposed to be relieved in a scene, he didn’t give off any other vibe than the one he had been giving off for the rest of the show, blank sort of angry. It felt and sounded like all the actors were just reading their lines.
The laugh track, used to alert the audience when to laugh, was needed because the funny parts were hard to be found. Not only does it alert them when to laugh, it is used to make the audience, who is most likely sitting alone in a room with no light except the screen, feel not so lonely. In this show, the laugh track is used way too much. The laugh literally occurs every five seconds, annoying the viewers with its consistency. If something was truly funny, it wouldn’t need a laugh track to tell the viewers that it is. True humour doesn’t need to be recognized. It has to be heard or seen and then accepted happily.
The camera angles were an issue, too. If different angles and positions had been used, more could’ve come from the story. It used the exact same angles for the whole show. They try to show the whole room instead of close up or moving shots.
The writing of the show is awful. The lines were too forced. They tried to set up a punchline as quickly as they could to stuff more “comedy” into their twenty minute show. I’m not sure how they did it, but they ruined the point of view on sitcoms. They jump for every single opportunity there is for a pun and take it. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad if there wasn’t a laugh track and if they gave people time to recover. If someone actually found the show funny and great, they would most likely laugh after the jokes; they need time to recover from laughing so they can hear the next joke and possibly laugh again.
Overall, the show is rather boring and I personally do not like it. Some parts of it may be funny but overall, they try too hard and supply so much setup that it’s no longer funny. Laughter brings people together unless the only laughter there is the laugh track from the TV; it might even draw them apart.
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