$#*!, it's another hair joke!

Not long ago, we examined an interesting triple entendre hair joke contained in the fourth episode (called "Code Ed") of the new Bill Shatner sitcom $#*! My Dad Says. It was subtle: the dialog was spoken by fictional son Vince (Will Sasso) and all that was required from Bill Shatner was a knowing glance - but he knew, and we knew he knew!

Flash forward a mere eleven episodes to the latest installment called "Ed Goes to Court" - and we have another reference to Bill Shatner's hair (or lack thereof, obviously)! And this time, it's even more direct, even more impossible to overlook and the dialog is spoken by Bill Shatner himself. Did we see this sort of thing in Star Trek or TJ Hooker or Boston Legal? - we think not. The times are certainly changing...


The episode opens with Ed's bald son Vince (Will Sasso) shocking the family by wearing a mustache. He explains that he has a rash above his top lip and couldn't shave this morning.


"I just can't believe how fast it grows in," says his wife Bonnie (Nicole Sullivan), noting the mustache's relative thickness.

"Yeah, it's a family trait. We all grow mustaches really fast," replies Vince.

Bonnie turns to Ed (William Shatner): "Ed, I've never seen you with a mustache."

"No, that hair thing is from his mother's side...more specifically his mother."

The first part of Bill Shatner's response makes no sense unless it's a joke about the actor's own lack of hair. For Ed, just like Kirk, TJ Hooker and Denny Crane, has a suspiciously thick full head of hair in the fictional world of the show.


Bill Shatner looks a little unsettled as he delivers the line, but deliver the line he does. Did he suggest the joke or was it suggested to him? Did he resist or embrace the opportunity to further ease up on his former toupological denials? So many questions...

The "...more specifically his mother" line that follows tempers the former as it suggests that Vince's mother was really hairy - that's the joke. But to those in the know, the first part is a clear and remarkably direct reference to one of the worst kept secrets in showbiz - that Bill Shatner has very little real hair and wears a toupee.

Here's the clip:

At the end of the episode, concluding a brotherly competition about who can grow the thickest mustache, younger son Henry (Jonathan Sadowski) enters the kitchen, revealing the results of his efforts:


But Ed, again perhaps referencing Bill Shatner's expertise regarding unreal hair, smells a rat (if you'll pardon the pun).

No-one fools (or outshines) Bill Shatner with hairpieces, even ones not on the head.

So, rather amazingly, he rips the fake tash off his son's upper lip with all the energy the 79-year old can muster.


He then holds the thing in his hand, studying it knowingly. Too small for Bill Shatner to make use of...

If we reference current events in Egypt, there are no doubt times when we simply don't believe particular moments will ever happen - and then they do, just like that. Back in the days of Bill Shatner's absolute toupee denials, such jokes would have been unthinkable. In both cases, the key word now being used is "transition".

Perhaps, in some strange way, this is Bill Shatner's own message to the world - using the unmistakable power of his own toupee: if I can make subtle jokes about having no hair, then anything is possible! You only have to believe! We understand that a recent statement by President Mubarak that: "William Shatner's hair is entirely real and there will be no more discussions" may have been the straw that broke the camel's back for people in Egypt. People around the world clearly will no longer have their freedoms to discuss William Shatner's toupee suppressed!


And what of $#*! My Dad Says itself? When we referenced the last hair joke, we couldn't help but use the opportunity to express our concerns over the show's weaknesses. It's improving, we wrote, but the series is still deeply flawed. Do some stunt casting, we argued (check, more please!), change the way Vince and Bonnie are used (they've since moved in with Ed)...

But, serious problems remain. At best, $#*! My Dad Says is frequently average, occasionally terrible, sometimes good but rarely brilliant. Why? One of the biggest issues, we think, is that the characters are not clearly defined. Let's examine two of the (arguably) great sitcoms:

Cheers: until Shelley Long departed, the character tension was remarkably easy to define - a highly strung intellectual snob (Diane) and an anti-intellectual hedonistic jock (Sam, alias Ted Danson) thrust together. If only either of them would give a little ground, be a little less of the character extreme that they are, then we could realistically hope that they could get together. And there were plenty of clues to give the audience hope: Sam was done drinking and chose to hang around with a bunch of introspective losers rather than his former jock friends; Diane was working in a bar, her intellectual hopes dashed by her own multiple neuroses. That was the tension. That was the promise of change and evolution. Two opposites drawn together. Dynamite.


In the British sitcom Fawlty Towers, once again a series of extreme contrasts were forced to interact: Basil Fawlty (John Cleese), incompetent and borderline insane; his wife Sybil, orderly but cold; Manuel, servile, chaotic; Polly, orderly, sane, young to the wife's old. A multitude of contrasts.

Star Trek also underlines how great drama (including comedy) stems from taking a single sane human consciousness, splitting it into constituent contradictory parts and forcing these deficient components to interact, hoping that gradually they will coalesce and fill out each other's inadequacies.


Kirk (decision), Spock (reason), McCoy (emotion). One whole divided, yet inseparable. Tension. Will Spock show emotion; will McCoy ever acknowledge Spock's logic; which option will Kirk choose? The perpetual promise of evolution.

Very little of this is evident in $#*! My Dad Says. Its characters are a cluttered mess of ill-defined and often shifting attributes. Add them together and you have no complete human whole. As a result, little evolution of character is promised and little tension - other than of the contrived kind - is offered.


Before the second season begins (if there is one), we urge the producers to have a wholesale re-think of the show. We continue to believe (with the greatest of respect to the actors' talents) that the characters of Vince and Bonnie should be dropped. They offer little prospect of evolution and they offer few if any inter-character tension dynamics - simply put, they appear to serve no purpose. A more viable alternative is an interesting ensemble of semi-regular external characters (the neighbor, the cleaner etc.)

So then you have a focus on a crazy father and regular son living together. Define the extreme traits that each of them possesses and run with it. Make Ed more charming, more Shatner - less of an asshole. More lovably grumpy and strangely wise like Walter Matthau in I'm Not Rappaport (based on a play, a very distinctive old man refuses to grow old gracefully causing tensions with his daughter, trailer here).

I'm Not Rappaport

And seriously figure out how Sadowski's character (still woefully ill-defined) can interact with Ed.

We'll end by referencing a scene from the end of Back to the Future (1985). Marty is about to return to 1985 - but what's the point as the Doc will still be dead, having been shot as his young friend escaped to 1955. But Marty is thinking two-dimensionally. Suddenly it dawns on him - he's sitting in a time machine, he can go anywhere he wants (to before the Doc was shot)! The producers of $#*! My Dad Says would benefit from such a moment. They have Shatner, they have a sitcom - they can do anything they want! Be bolder, be more daring, more unconventional, but also define the basic humanity of your characters and never, ever cheapen that - and maybe, just maybe, this series will succeed.

Poll result and $#*!, it's a hair joke!

A truly surprising set of results. Only 19% of voters believe that Bill Shatner's current "Denny whatever-it-is" hair is a toupee. 21% believe that it's a straight up transplant, while a further 45% believe that it's a transplant sometimes supplemented with toupees or thickener (a total of 66% in favor of the transplant theory). 13% believe that it's a mysterious new technology possibly given to Bill Shatner by aliens. Thanks for voting!

Now to an interesting moment from the latest (fourth) episode of Bill Shatner's new sitcom $#*! My Dad Says!. Ed's (Shatner) older son Vince (Will Sasso) and his wife stop by the house to pick up some old baby pictures. Why? Watch below:

"Bonnie wants to hang some [pictures] in the house so when people come in they can see what I used to look like when I only had a few hairs on my head and those chubby cheeks," he says before turning to his father and giving him a probing grin. Ed, pauses to process the thought.


His younger son, Henry (Jonathan Sadowski) also throws a brief knowing grin in his father's direction.

On the surface, this is a joke about the son. He's still chubby and still has very few hairs on his head. But, as our (suddenly very busy) "Department of Toupological Symbolism, Artistic Criticism and Metaphorical Subtextual Interpretation" notes, this moment could have a deeper meaning too.


The son is bald, but why? His dad's gene's, right? And why is everyone looking at Bill Shatner at that moment and not at Vince? It's possibly a very subtle toupological reference, with the triple entendre implying that there is a similarity between the baby with "a few hairs on my head and those chubby cheeks" and Bill Shatner, who is a little, shall we say, round and also in real life has very few hairs on his head.

The actors are apparently visibly all aware of the sub-subtext of the moment, as evidenced by their expressions, with Bill Shatner also apparently willingly along for the ride (messing with our minds).

We can't leave this particular installment (called "Code Ed") without mentioning that the episode also features (the producers apparently pulled out all the stops - hair jokes and singing) a classic moment of Bill Shatner singing, including a reference to his infamous performance of "Rocket Man" back in the late 1970s.

Of the entire series, the prevailing view seems to be that it started off pretty bad, but is improving - "better, much better" starts a recent review. We entirely agree; the first two episodes, we think, were pretty bland, the third episode was better and the fourth (the one with the hair joke and singing) actually kind of good. See here for another review in which the writer, begrudgingly, shifts from disdain about $#*! My Dad Says to a sense that maybe the show isn't so bad after all - the phrases "continue to loathe" and "awesome" are both included...


So can this show become great? And will it survive or will it be canceled? The latter question is likely answered by a "no" for now - as the ratings are surprisingly strong. Of course, new shows like this can be canceled after six episodes, thirteen episodes, after one season...networks tend to commit to the life of such projects in small chunks, while the threat of the axe hovers from on high and ratings fluctuations are analyzed on a weekly basis. But for now, the show lives.

The first question is a little tougher to answer. When we first heard about the series and watched the initial clips from the pilot (which was subsequently re-cast and entirely re-shot - two pilots, where have we heard that before?), we were worried. An entire series based on saying things rather than doing them seemed to fly in the face of the most basic rules of any drama, including comedy. This, our staff thought, could be a disaster.


But the writers evidently figured out some of the inherent problems quite quickly. A surprising amount of word-of-mouth publicity likely compounded the fear among the show's producers of creating something mediocre or disastrous, especially with expectations and interest so high.

Meanwhile, the two main actors, the father and son pair portrayed by Bill Shatner and Jonathan Sadowski, have slowly developed a genuine chemistry as a classic double act. And that double act (Shatner as the funny man, Sadowski as the straight man) is where the potential for this series arguably lies.

Allowing Shatner to be Shatner (rather than having him sitting around in his armchair saying stuff) seems to be yielding results and gradually, slowly, the seeds of something special could be germinating.


But there are still, in our view, several problems: having the supporting characters of the married duo of Vince and Bonnie endlessly finding ways of wandering into Ed's house for a few minutes each episode seems very "outdated sitcom-style" and arguably doesn't quite work, often coming across as a distraction from the central plot. Nicole Sullivan as Bonnie, with the greatest respect to the actress' talents, we feel, doesn't work. Her character lacks any meaningful character dynamics with the two leading players. Should she be re-cast or indeed should both of these characters be dropped entirely? Perhaps, or at least change the way that they are used.

Secondly, as critics noted at the start of the series, the conventional road is proving to be the disappointing one. Be bolder. Be weirder. Be sillier. Be less conventional sitcom. Breaking the fourth wall with "Rocket Man" and hair in-jokes is great (too much of this could cheapen the effect, but the potential for stories is limitless). How about some stunt casting for guest stars? Crucially, the show as "$#*! My Dad Does" seems to work, while the homely, innocent tone arguably provides viewers an uplifting respite from real world gloom.


UPDATE: CBS has picked up the show for a full season.

Hair pre-production...

Following on from our previous post, and inspired by some of your comments, we thought we'd examine Bill Shatner's hair choices for the upcoming sitcom based on the "Sh*t My Dad Says" Twitter page in which the actor is set to star .

At some point soon, Bill Shatner will take part in costume, makeup and hair tests for the CBS project. Perhaps the producers won't feel the need (or will be too uncomfortable) to mention that the real-life dad from "Sh*t My Dad Says" is bald - and that will be the end of it. In that case, Bill Shatner will appear with his suspiciously young-looking current "Denny Crane" style.

But there is also a possibility that a level of trust will develop between Bill Shatner and the producers and a climate of experimentation will ensue, one that extends to toupular issues. Who knows, maybe Bill Shatner, eager for something new, will actually be the one to bring it up...


Or, with some awkwardness, Bill Shatner may be asked for his thoughts about, you know, how he feels he should look. Nervous pause...producers' hearing their own hearts beating... "What HAVE we said?!!" If the producers are lucky, Bill Shatner may agree that he should indeed go bald in this production - (throughout his entire career, Bill Shatner has never done this, not even, we believe, with a "shaven head" or an obvious bald cap).

Doctored image - sourced here.

So what then? Crucially, Bill Shatner could actually go bald while still preserving the illusion that his hair is real. This avenue may be a viable compromise. Here are the options:

1.) Bill Shatner goes toup-less but a story is leaked to the media that the actor is shaving his head for this role. It's a lie, but at least a revolutionary revelation is avoided. The upside is that we finally get to see Bill Shatner without his toupee.


2.) Bill Shatner wears an obvious bald-cap, and perhaps a "balding old man" wig on top of his toupee and/or plugs. This would be somewhat ridiculous, but it is a viable option that again avoids revolutionary revelations. The downside is that we don't really get to see Bill Shatner without his toupee and the whole thing will probably cause all sorts unwelcome attention.


3.) Bill Shatner goes toup-less but has a small line of latex applied to the front of his forehead that makes it look like he is wearing a bald cap. Again, a ridiculous choice but the upside is that Bill Shatner does indeed appear toup-less.

So those are the bald options. On the other hand, Bill Shatner could also go in the opposite direction and do what he did in the the Star Trek episode "The Deadly Years" (the one where some of the crew grow old) - tossing aside any attempts at believability and making his "old man hair" even thicker than usual:


Or perhaps Bill Shatner and his various toupular machinations are contractually viewed as one and the same - audiences don't just switch on for Bill Shatner, but also his toupees - in that case, seeing the actor bald could be viewed by as a risky step too far. We should also add that Bill Shatner is actually four years older than the elderly dad he is set to play.

What will Bill Shatner ultimately decide? It's a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma covered by a toupee!