TV Picks: Father of the Pride

Remember Coupling?

Of course you don't.

Okay, I'm being overly presumptuous, but not by much.

Coupling was a raunchy dating dramedy starring twenty-somethings, based on a successful British comedy of the same name. Touted as the series to fill in the void of Friends, Coupling was a staunch failure. So, NBC thought, instead of having a comedy of the young dating crowd, lets have a comedy about talking white lions.

Yes, the heir to the throne held by shows like Cosby, Cheers, Seinfeld, and Friends is the King of the Jungle.

Called Father of the Pride, this CGI-animated program stars legends like John Goodman and Carl Reiner as the voices of white lions in Siegfried and Roy's Las Vegas show. Produced by DreamWorks Television, the first of thirteen episodes in the series will debut on NBC sometime after the Summer Athens Olympics.

The producers are going for an all-star voice cast in the series, including stars John Goodman, Cheryl Hines, Carl Reiner and Orlando Jones. A slew of other big names are signed up to supply guest voices, including Eddie Murphy, Lisa Kudrow, Danny DeVito, Matt Lauer, Andy Richter and Christina Applegate. I must question the need for an all-star voice cast in the series, it's as if they're trying to hide insufficiencies in plot or character development. The Simpsons only started to try to get guests a few seasons in, once they had already established the details of their show. It's as if the series is permanently in sweeps-week mode.

There's also a lot of synergy going on. One report has DreamWorks Feature Animation deparment sticking Donkey, of Shrek fame, in DreamWorks Television's new series. The episode, set to air in the November sweeps week, it will air "perhaps just in time for the DVD release of Shrek 2."

Father of the Pride won't be cheap either. While it took a few seasons for the casts of the previous NBC Must See TV Thursday programs to demand higher wages, these pixel-based celebrities aren't cheap to animate. Each episode costs $2 million American, that's $26 million for the whole season.

An image of the series can be seen at http://www.comingsoon.net/news.php?id=4078, or in the Saturday, March 27, 2004 issue of Entertainment Weekly. Other than that, you'll have to wait until May 9, when the Friends one-hour series finale airs. More spots will debut during the NBC broadcast of the Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece.

I don't definitively know that this series is family-friendly, seeing the line-up it will be shown in. However, I can't imagine NBC risking their reputation, with a ravenous lion in sheep's clothing. Even if it is a family show, they should aim for better, cutting edge material than Shrek,

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