The Masons and the Pow­ells have fin­ished with their lat­est film endeavor: Fruitcake. This is the first time to my knowl­edge that they’ve attempted to make a com­edy of some sort that was­n’t a spoof and I guess it’s an inter­est­ing pro­ject. The premise is that a drunken young man hides an engage­ment ring meant for his girl­friend in a fruit­cake and mails it to her fam­i­ly. After sober­ing up and real­iz­ing just how stupid that was, he trav­els across coun­try attempt­ing to chase it down as it gets re-gifted time and again.

The show is fun­ny, in spurts but so much of it falls short through sim­ple poor tim­ing or just straight up non-se­quitur or unbe­liev­able dialog. Some­times that’s the intent, but more often it just seems like the writ­ers did­n’t think the scenes through. I’ll give you an exam­ple of what I mean:

In the third episode, Guy and Champ, our heroes (Guy is the one who put his ring in the cake,) pay a visit to Uncle Eustace. We are informed:

“You know how grow­ing up there was always that one uncle at thanks­giv­ing who had his own spe­cial smell and told jokes you did­n’t get but when­ever you asked mom and dad about him, they changed the sub­jec­t?”

“Un­cle Eustace is that uncle?”

“Ha, no. When you ask that uncle about uncle Eustace, he changes the sub­jec­t.”

That’s a funny exchange to be sure, but it com­pletely set’s the wrong expec­ta­tion for what we get when Uncle Eustace finally appears on screen. In most fam­i­lies, when mem­bers gen­er­ally avoid the sub­ject of one mem­ber, it’s usu­ally due to some­thing shame­ful. Because the mem­ber is in pris­on, for exam­ple. It’s gen­er­ally not just because he’s weird or goofy. If it is a per­son­al­lity quirk that they’re so embar­rassed about, it had bet­ter be pretty big. We are thus lead to believe that there is some­thing seri­ously wrong with Uncle Eustace.

But here’s the thing… Uncle Eustace isn’t in pris­on, he’s does­n’t wear wom­en’s under­wear, he’s not a hip­pie, he not any­thing real­ly, just a lit­tle weird. He owns a Zune instead of an iPod and wears shorts with a suit­coat. Oh and he has a laserdisc col­lec­tion which he’s really keen on. That’s really not that weird at all. My dad has a laserdisc col­lec­tion. Lot’s of folks have weird hob­bies, it’s not that unusu­al.

Uncle Eustace strikes me as kind-of-a-lit­tle annoy­ing, noth­ing more. If his fam­ily avoids talk­ing about him because of the things I saw of him in the show, then they’re the kind of real jerks I usu­ally like to avoid. But that’s not really the prob­lem here. The prob­lem is that our writ­ers over­sell Eustace as a char­ac­ter and then under deliv­er. It’s clear that the writ­ers were going for some kind of wacky char­ac­ter but Eustace just comes off as lame.

There were sev­eral things that the writ­ers could have done to fix this. First, they could have dropped the fore­bod­ing exchange above so that when Eustace is intro­duced his weird­ness would have come across as more of a shock and there­fore more fun­ny. Sec­ond, they could have amped up the crazy on Eustace so that Brick’s descrip­tion of him turns out to be an under­state­ment. Third­ly, they could have turned the joke on its head and turned Brick’s warn­ing into a petty gripe, that is, make it so that Eustace is actu­ally nor­mal and make the joke that (sur­prise) Brick is actu­ally being a jerk to her uncle. Any of these would have worked and would­n’t have been a lot of effort to pull off, but they were missed.

The show has a lot of funny ideas behind it, and some funny moments, but it also got some wasted poten­tial which is shame. There are a lot of these moments where the joke just does­n’t work, but it could have. I’m just not sure what to make of that.