Where, you may be asking yourselves, did DadWagon come from? It is a question that has vexed humankind since the dawn of history (which is when we launched, five months ago), but today I am here to answer it.
Answer: Thank Bravo. Back in 2008, when the cable channel first started airing “The Real Housewives of New York City,” I was frustrated. Incensed. Ranting and raving to anyone who would listen (i.e., my wife), and even to those who would not listen (i.e., my wife), that this was a sham. The truer, more daring thing, I foamed, would be to run “The Real Househusbands of New York City.”
Or at least to start it as a blog.
But because other things (work, baby) interfered, it took a year and a half to transmogrify that original idea into the DadWagon we have today.
I bring all this up because I was remembering those halcyon early days of kvetching and complaint, and a quick Google search directed me to something I had somehow missed: “The Househusbands of Hollywood,” which ran on the Fox Reality Channel from last August through October. (Maybe that’s why I missed it—FRC is not among our “favorites.”)
This is gold! Five househusbands—ranging from the guy who played Ron Johnson on “A Different World” to former L.A. Dodger Billy Ashley to a loser dude who dropped out of medical school to become a nonworking actor—struggle to balance their home duties (cleaning, childcare) with their legitimate work aspirations, all the while hoping their wives will, just for once, treat them like the responsible adults they happen not to be.
Friends, it is awful, depressing, addictively unfunny gold. I’m embarrassed to be in the same parental boat as these guys. There’s a scene in the first episode where the almost-doctor has proudly installed a kegerator in his kitchen, and is beaming as his blonde wife, a lawyer, comes home. She is not pleased, to say the least, and after a short discussion we see them wheeling it out to the garage, she worrying that he’ll bump it into the walls. “I’m doing what you want,” he whines, “and you’re still criticizing me!”
Okay, at the same time, I have to say I recognize a certain amount of actual reality in this TV reality. The way that the husbands justify and rationalize their inferior positions and life choices and fatherly incompetence is perhaps uncomfortably familiar. There’s a general “Who knew this would be my life?” feeling to the show, which is pretty much how I feel most of the time. And I’m sure that my lifestyle looks just as loathsome to an L.A. family as theirs appears to me.
Which is really just a way of saying: Hey Fox, give me a call sometime, wouldja?
Kegerator’s wife continually resets her whine gun from stun to death in every episode. I recommended they not breed. The bromance between Charlie and Ryan O’Neal is… weird. I recommend they not breed either.
Dear Dads,
I am curious. Where do you guys originally come from?
Gigi
I think that Theodore is the only native New Yorker. I’m from the Florida Keys, Matt’s a Masshole, and I forget where Christopher is from (although a quick trip through the archives would no doubt cough up that answer)
I’m not a native New Yorker, but my parents are (both were born and raised in Brooklyn). They moved to the New Jersey suburbs not long before I was born, and I moved back into the city for good the moment I got out of school.
How’s this for New York cred? My grandparents’ family business was a frozen-custard stand on the Coney Island boardwalk.