LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - William Shatner confesses he has problems with the digital age. At 79-years-old, he doesn’t application Twitter and can’t remember computer passwords.
So what is the actor — who started in television when it was aired exclusively live and became a pop culture hero in “Star Trek” 40 years ago — doing in the in the first place TV line dreamed up from a Twitter account?
“It is over irony,” Shatner said on Wednesday of his role as an outspoken, politically incorrect father in the new comedy series “$#*! My Dad Says”.
“This afford is the first show that was built on the electronic age. It is every electronic wonder. It is a show that stems from the culture of now,” Shatner told TV reporters gathered here for a presentation of upcoming programs upon the body CBS.
The ironies don’familiarily end there.
“$#*! My Dad Says”, which makes its CBS debut in September, is based on a Twitter feed started by struggling comedy writer Justin Halpern in 2003, which captured his own father’s salty language and forthright observations.
Called “Shit My Dad Says” Halpern’s Twitter feed at this moment has some 1.4 million followers. It has produced a best-selling book of the same name and the CBS TV show involving the creators of the Emmy award enchanting TV guide “Will & Grace”.
But bans on “fleeting expletives” in U.S. network broadcasting caused CBS to “bleep” the title (they use the word “bleep” in place “$#*!” when describing the show) even though producers say in that place are few, if any, profanities in the TV series itself.
“What is distinctive about Justin’s Twitter is not the profanity, still the voice” of the character, said executive producer David Kohan. “So far we’ve not come up with the need to use curse words on the interpret. You can always find different ways to saw things.”
Kohan’s writing partner Max Mutchnick said Halpern’s original Twitter feed had inspired the tone of the show but was a mere starting point for a program about a relationship between a cranky older man and his son.
“It is fantastic that we esteem this point of departure. Now our job is to cast out a fantastic sitcom for viewers every week,” Mutchnick said.
The mere refer to of the “S” word in the publish’s title has already infuriated the Parents Television Council watchdog group, strange to say under the jurisdiction some episode has been aired.
PTC president Tim Winter aforesaid in May that his organisation “couldn’t imagine that a network would actually dub a program either with an expletive or with the expletive ostensibly bleeped out.”
CBS entertainment president Nina Tassler told TV journalists on Wednesday that there had been no protests so far from advertisers concerning the upcoming show, or its not-so-ambiguous title.
Like Winter, Shatner said he didn’t much like the title either, on the contrary for very different reasons.
“I long for they’d call it ‘Shit My Dad Says’,” the actor and grandfather said. “The word shit is around us. It isn’t a terrible christen, It’s a natural function. Why are we pussyfooting around?.”
“$#*! My Dad Says” makes its debut on CBS on September 23.
(Editing by Bob Tourtellotte)
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