I Hate My Teenage Daughter: Premiere

I Hate My Teenage Daughter is the latest (and seemingly the last) show to premiere in this fall’s primetime lineup. When a new show comes on this late in the season, does it even have a shot against tried-and-true evening favorites such as Parks and Recreation and Modern Family? The creators give it a shot by giving us uncensored access to the lives and thoughts of two single moms raising two spoiled-and-popular teenage daughters.  The catch is that these moms, when in high school, were the complete opposite of their teenage daughters: Annie, played by Jamie Pressley, grew up under the close surveillance of her religious parents; Nikki, played by Katie Finneran, had to face her classmates’ taunts for being overweight. The show leads with its piercing jokes, but once the dust settles it does not appear to have much more substance.

The show’s appeal lies in that the writers are not afraid to verbalize feelings many parents may have felt; Annie and Nikki stand out from mothers on other sitcoms because they are so frank with the audience about how insecure they feel. For example, Debra (Patricia Heaton) from Everybody Loves Raymond may have felt annoyed by her mother-in-law Marie’s jabs at her mothering skills, but rarely shows the audience her insecurities about those same skills. Annie and Nikki lay theirs out for all of us to observe—and maybe even mock.  This is seen in the first scene of the show. The pilot episode starts with Annie and Nikki in a café, griping about two mean girls. Although they don’t refer to these mean girls by names, we later realize that they are talking about their daughters Sophie and Mackenzie (played by Kristi Lauren and Aisha Dee, respectively) when they arrive at the same cafe and mock them. Annie wonders out loud "Why are they so mean to us?" to which Nikki mutters "Because we're their moms. God I hate them." This first scene displays how much of the humor comes from the moms making comments about how awful their daughters are. A show that starts their pilot episode with a mom calling her daughter a "bitch" is not holding any punches. However, the show may not have much else to trade on other than its biting humor. 

In exchange for laughs, the characters are undeveloped, and after a half hour the show falls flat. I felt like I did not connect with the characters: the teenagers seemed too mean, and the moms seemed a little too pathetic. Although Nikki and Annie get plenty of laugh (some of the funniest jokes come from their witty banter) they also seemed helpless and childish because they obsess over their daughters’ lives—the first episode revolves around Sophie and Mackenzie going to their first high school dance and their mothers’ conflict between grounding them for their behavior at school and making this first dance a memorable one. On the other hand, Sophie and Mackenzie come off as insensitive, even downright mean. They rarely get any screen time by themselves, and they spend much of the first episode mocking their mothers. In addition, the fathers, Matt and Gary (played by Eric Sheffer Stevens and Chad Coleman), are just two deadbeat dads and nothing more: when the mothers ground the daughters at Nikki’s house for locking a handicapped young man in the women’s bathroom, Sophie and Mackenzie text their fathers repeatedly, complaining about their mothers’ behavior. The fathers come to their daughters’ aid—but resort to showering their grounded daughters with cash when they will not stop complaining. Not surprisingly, this is their last appearance in the episode. In this case, it would have been more effective to show the teenage daughters interacting with each other, or have the daughters talking to their fathers about what happened at school. The show is meant to be a comedy, but character development is still important in getting the audience to come back next week and watch the show.

However, the one thing that can be salvaged from this show is Nikki. Katie Finnegan’s performance as Nikki stands out, whether it’s her self-deprecating jokes about her alopecia or her physical humor (she is not afraid to throw her whole body into her acting, like when Mackenzie walks upstairs to her room, away from her mother and Nikki slowly falls face first onto the stairs, rejected). Her interactions with Annie may be the saving grace of this show, but when the show is called I Hate My Teenage Daughter, one wonders whether the title of the show might keep the writers from actually delving deeper into their friendship.

In sum, this show missed the mark because behind the laughs there was not much else to hold onto. The show might lead viewers in with a risqué title and punch lines, but they need to keep the viewers’ attention through a whole season in order to be successful. Is it a scriptwriter’s obligation to make the audience sympathize with a character? Perhaps not, but they should try to get viewers to care about the characters, and in the season premiere this did not happen. If the writers of the show want to make I Hate My Teenage Daughter a hit, they will need to make this show about much more than just the moms hating their teenage daughters. However, considering the show is titled exactly that, their hands may be tied.