It should’ve worked. If ever there was a president suited to play the average bumbling guy who is pushed, in spite of himself, into high office, it’s George the Second. And yes, there was some pretty funny stuff in "An Aborted Dinner Date," Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s first episode of That’s My Bush, their sitcom about life in the White House. The fetus-like, hominoid, pro-life champion was wonderfully grotesque and straight out of South Park’s shock-theater vocabulary—especially when he ends up getting mistaken by the amorous Laura Bush for Dubya’s boner.

Still, there was a blandness to most of the show that’s hard to get away from. Maybe the show would have been more outrageous if it weren’t on basic cable (like the episode that showed up on the internet with the Bush daughters as lesbians). Or maybe, because it’s about the President, there’s still, believe it or not, some inhibitions as to material. After all, the show that preceded last night’s debut of That’s My Bush was a rerun of South Park featuring a moving plea, complete with violins, for the right of dirty old men to screw little boys.

There are two problems with this new sitcom: the first is that it’s hard to satirize sitcoms while using their devices. Trey Parker, who wrote the first episode, sees the series as an indictment of the genre’s banal plots, cookie-cutter characters and Henny Youngman one-liners. The other problem is that—unlike Saturday Night Live skits—the issues dealt with are not topical.

Put these two together (a generic form and generic situations) with a more-or-less defanged Parker and Stone (they created South Park), and you have a bland-on-bland postmodern sitcom that pretty much defeats the purpose of the exercise.

They meant to do it this way. "What we did at the very beginning of this," says Parker, "was to write down some of the major issues of today, the things that won’t go away, and we matched them up with standard sitcom plot devices." Like most sitcoms, this series was planned last fall before the elections, before they knew who’d be president, and they didn’t care who won. After all, the Lucy/Desi, Ralph/Alice dynamic works for both men, the brainy TV people must have told themselves in endless story conferences.

"Throw in the Knowing Maid and the thing’ll practically write itself."

Unfortunately, once you take the topical out of the political, you lose your edge. The reason the Bush character is so funny on Saturday Night Live is because he’s a satirical projection of the easily confused frat boy into actual (current) situations.

Now, if they could inject that element, the breaking news story, into the That’s My Bush show, then you’d have something to work with. I mean, here we are today in a kind of Dr. Strangelovean situation with China, a country we understand even less than we did the evil empire of the Soviet Union, and we have Dubya toe-to-toe with his counterpart daring and double-daring him as if this were some kind of chicky run. He’s like the pipsqueak in the fraternity who chins himself up to the top of the wall, hurls a few threats and then runs away and hides. (It also does not inspire confidence when George looks down at his notes between the words "release the crew and" [looks down] "the airplane.")

This is the sort of tense hotline, finger-on-the-recall-button situation that could be excellent fodder for comedy. "No, George, that’s not the remote!" Maybe George, finding himself alone in an international crisis—where are all those minders who are really running the country now that we need them?—calls up Scully from The X-Files and gets her to explain to the Chinese "competent experts" that we weren’t spying, we were chasing a rogue UFO whose fiendish plot was to steal the secret of Cantonese cuisine (MSG) and that, far from violating Chinese air space, we’ve just saved civilization from intergalactic miscegenation.

Okay, okay, maybe I’m too quick to judge, maybe the show has possibilities. After all, next week’s episode is about an execution, always a hilarious subject.