What does 1600 penn mean

The trick is to find an actor who can infuse the sometimes bumbling main character with enough charm, and the performance with enough control, to carry the audience past behavior that, in real life, would quickly become annoying. Unfortunately, somewhere in between Episodes 1 and 2, he's tipped over — and he's taken his show with him.

So what a returning audience will find tonight, in Penn's "official" premiere, is a sitcom that has moved from agreeably silly to disagreeably dumb, a regression no network should want to see. Gad, who also serves as one of the show's executive producers, stars here as Skip Gilchrist, the wayward son of the president of the United States Bill Pullman.

Having been thrown out of college, Skip is now living in the White House, where he'll cause no end of trouble until his innate sweetness leads to a happy ending. Or at least that's the idea. Skip, however, isn't the president's only family problem.

And he has a bright teenage daughter Martha Maclsaac who has announced to America that she's pregnant — thanks, we discover, to a microphone mistakenly left on as the first episode was ending. Which is where the show quickly goes awry. Yet everything about the crisis feels both clumsy and false, from the mainstream media's willingness to call the president's teenage daughter a vulgar name to the president's whining about his anger management problems to the joint chiefs.

And the second episode funnier still. And the third as well. Humor is subjective, your mileage may vary, yada yada, but the first three episodes that NBC sent to critics did nothing for me.

He is the sort of character that the late Chris Farley used to play: an overgrown boy; bearish, manic, socially and physically inept, but good at heart. The pilot kicks off with Skip, now in his seventh year of college, pranking a frat house by shooting off fireworks on its lawn. One of the shells goes through a window and sets the place on fire, and Secret Service agents swoop in and stuff Josh in a limo to protect him.

Presumably the Secret Service has been following this doofus around for years cleaning up his messes. There were probably other equally fascinating ways the writers could have spun it, but they went the obvious route: mild reversal of expectations as pre-credits sting.