Titus
Cast & Key People
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Our Review
What begins as the true story of a Missouri boy whose best friend Ken gets shot by the boy’s own father becomes, in one of the great cold opens in sitcom history, the story of a family that simply decides the murder did not happen. Chevy Chase plays the father as a monster in a plaid jacket, and the show plays the denial dead straight. That is the engine: laugh track over horror show, and the audience never told which register to sit in.
It is also a coming out story that FOX aired for three seasons, with Titus’s sexuality a settled fact from the start while the joke lands on his family’s selective hearing, which in 2000 was genuinely strange network behavior. The whistled theme, the convertible, the field: the opening credits tell you exactly what kind of comedy this is, the sunny kind with a corpse in the passenger seat.
Watch in sprints. The seasons one finale blocks alone justify the whole run.
Our score: 7.5/10.
