I Met The Browns

Avery Tooley, a black moderate-conservative blogger, writes: "Last night, I did something atypical: I watched television. I probably watched more TV last night than I had all year, not counting sporting events. There wasn’t anything that I particularly wanted to see, but when I saw that they were running a marathon of the Tyler Perry shows, I wanted to take a look, just to see what the fuss was about. I should say going in that I was fairly biased. I knew from the get-go, and had been warned by a couple of my friends, that the humor was going to be a little lowbrow for me. Course, that’s kinda funny to me, because in real life, I’m probably the lowbrow guy out the bunch. Then too, all the shows I like most have some lowbrow elements, if they’re not entirely lowbrow themselves, so that wasn’t a real deterrent. So I watched."

He continues: "Neither show really impressed me too much. I didn’t think House of Payne was any worse than most sitcoms that I can sit through without a whole lotta laughing. I think one of the episodes I watched may have gotten a decent 'HA!' outta me, but that was about it. Otherwise, I was not terribly impressed, but not terribly disappointed. For the most part, I didn’t necessarily find it funny, but I didn’t think it was coonery at all. Meet The Browns, though, was emphatically not my speed. Let’s just say it like that. If this is the show’s first season, I guess I won’t say too much because it does take some shows a minute to really catch their stride."

More: "A couple of things I liked about the shows was that they tried to address some fairly serious issues, and they showed a range of body types. Really, the body type thing is a fairly major plus for the shows. Not like I watch a lot, but you don’t really see a lot of heavyweights on TV in roles that don’t use their weight as a source of comedy. I give them kudos for that."