This Sitcom Has Aged So Badly Its Misogynistic Title Character Wouldn’t Fly in 2024
And here we thought Friends was cringeworthy…
It's not easy to create something that will be appreciated many years after its release. It's really hard to predict what will be trendy or at least normal in the years to come.
That's why a lot of sitcoms from the late 90s or early 2000s have aged like milk, with cringeworthy characters, storylines, and sometimes even the premise itself. People often say that a lot of the storylines from Friends have aged badly, but compared to this show, Friends is a brilliant series, still totally relevant.
The sitcom we want to talk about now is called According to Jim, and the title character couldn't be creepier. No wonder the show received so much hate when it first aired. The show premiered in 2001 and lasted until 2009.
Was According to Jim Really Bad?
Created by Tracy Newman and Jonathan Stark, it stars Jim Belushi as Jim, a suburban dad who has a wife and several kids. The main thing to note about him is that he chooses to live by traditional gender roles, and that's exactly what goes terribly wrong…
As a representative of “men” of the era, he constantly lies to his wife and frankly is not a great father for his kids, which is actually a rather strange thing to see in a sitcom where the protagonists are usually portrayed as these perfect people.
But Jim is far from perfect. In fact, he’s even far from bearable.
“When I watch the tv show according to Jim I sometimes find myself feeling oddly disturbed. The fact that Jim was unable to validate his wife when she was grieving, thought it would be funny to spit in her hot chocolate wasn’t funny at all. I hope no one has to deal with this stuff in real life. A sitcom should be things we relate to…not question if this would actually happen in reality. That’s just my opinion,” Redditor Professional-Fig4331 said.
There's no way the show would have passed today with such a misogynistic character in the title role. But maybe there was something back then that softened the image of Jim and made it at least a little fun for viewers?