Critic, criticize thyself

I spend a lot of time dumping on just about everything but myself. Today, I'll change that and review my reviews that appeared in today's paper. First up: FX's "Testees:"

"Testees" may be the most sadistic situation comedy in history. This series, about human lab rats who allow themselves to be subjected to pharmaceutical experiments and trials, is ruthlessly cynical and yet (after one episode) fairly unfocused.

What could be an inspired idea just seems to be a forum for flatulence and lactation and enlarged male-member gags and worse. Decent comedy can come from such low-rent inspiration, but tonight's episode doesn't quite convince a viewer that the show will aspire to much beyond its penis and rectal discomfort gags.

Peter (Steve Markle) and Ron (Jeff Kassel) are slackers who make ends meet by acquiescing to horrific experiments at global nemesis Testico (the show is rife with such puns). Testico's stock-in-trade is dangerous protocols that will deform its test subjects: Tonight, Peter discovers he's pregnant.

The show's humor can be agreeably deadpan, but "Testees" isn't a satire about corporate avarice and incompetence; it's just about humiliating its characters as much as possible. Its creator and co-star, Kenny Hotz, worked for a season on "South Park." Clearly, he learned all about the show's bad-taste and nothing about its clever social insight.

*

Truth be told, this isn't much of a review. But space in newspapers is at a premium these days, so you try your best.

Still, I'm not fond of this effort, though it hits the major notes. I'm a fan of transgressive humor that I imagine people being offended by for all the wrong reasons, and in this piece, I think I just come off as something of a prude because I don't think I fully explain the show's inability to differentiate between provocative humor and gratuitous gross-out gags.

It could've been worse: A copy editor asked me to hone a sentence that was, admittedly, all over the place, and I'm grateful she gave me that chance, because the story's now a smidgen more coherent.

Also, it's a fool's errand to assess a show's viability on the basis of one episode, which is all that was provided. But it seems that "Testees" is a show that, in six-to-eight-minute sketches on "SNL" or "MADtv," might be funny, but, dragged out to sitcom-length, not so much. And it'll be following "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," which should school this show on how to do tasteless humor right.

So why didn't I just say that?