• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, June 14, 2016

Occasionally, a new TV show comes along to remind you that the summer TV season has been -- and in some cases still is -- a place for TV networks to burn off shows they have lying around on a shelf somewhere.

For business or contractual reasons, perhaps, they’re obligated to air these shows sometime, even if a show’s long-term (or even short-term) prospects are hopeless.

The new ABC sitcom “Uncle Buck,” premiering Tuesday (June 14), falls into this category. Despite my checkered history of prognostication when it comes to forecasting the success or failure of TV shows, I am reasonably certain that after this show’s available episodes run their course, you will never see it again.

This assessment is based partly on the show’s history. According to various press accounts, ABC ordered episodes to be produced more than a year ago. The fact that the network is just now getting around to airing them indicates that the show has been sitting around for a while as the network’s schedulers puzzled over when to air them.

Speaking of being puzzled: TV critics and viewers alike have cause to be puzzled over why the network sitcom factory keeps on churning out dreck like this “Uncle Buck” show, since it contains so many of the network sitcom clichés that have eyes rolling and eyebrows raising every time we come across them.

Take the word “penis.” It makes its first appearance in the premiere episode of “Uncle Buck” in just under three minutes as a mom berates her young teenage daughter for having a boy in her room under the pretext of tutoring him. “Wasn’t he the guy who drew a penis on your friend Gary’s forehead?” Mom asks. Cue rimshot.

At the episode’s conclusion, Uncle Buck somehow sneaks into this teenage boy’s bedroom and snaps a photo of the lad as he emerges naked from a shower. The nude photo is part of Uncle Buck’s scheme to blackmail the boy into deleting suggestive photos of Uncle Buck’s niece, and other girls, from the boy’s cell phone.

Yes, the lad is a cad. But what part of Uncle Buck sneaking into an underage boy’s bedroom to take a naked picture of him is not creepy? It gets worse when Buck comments on the size of the boy’s genitalia, which emerges as the basis of Buck’s blackmail threat to post the boy’s nude photo on the Internet -- revealing to one and all what the boy is lacking. To drive the point home, Buck nicknames the boy “Inchworm.”

Didn’t anyone -- writers, producers or network executives -- notice that this scenario was in questionable taste before OK’ing this show for air? Is it really possible for people to be this clueless? Apparently, it is.

“Uncle Buck” is the second TV adaptation of the well-remembered 1989 movie that starred John Candy in the title role. The movie was first turned into a TV show in 1990 with comedian Kevin Meaney in the title role. The show was short-lived.

Here in the present day, the title role goes to Mike Epps, who leads an all-black cast in this reimagining of the Uncle Buck story. Some of us are old enough to remember when remaking a stage play, TV show or movie with an “all-black cast” was a novelty -- and often a noble and creative one at that. But there seems to be no rhyme or reason, at least creatively, for remaking “Uncle Buck” this way. 

As in the original movie, this new “Uncle Buck” has a suburban Chicago couple with three children suddenly needing to find a caretaker for their children. So they enlist their ne’er-do-well Uncle Buck, who is unemployed and homeless. We first encounter him in a bar wearing a crown of beer cans (seen in the photo above).

In the movie, the couple was responding to a death in the family that would require them to leave town quickly. In this new TV show, the couple are two busy professionals who need to head out of town either for purposes related to their jobs or to get away together to reconnect with each other. I watched the entire premiere episode, and even paid attention too, and I’m not sure exactly why they needed to recruit Uncle Buck as their nanny. One reason was clear, though: Their brat kids drove off the last caretaker they had.

Viewers will be driven off too -- and many of them because of the same brats. But not to worry: Few people will watch this new “Uncle Buck” in any case. As a result, we likely won’t see another one for at least 16 years.

“Uncle Buck” premieres Tuesday (June 14) with two back-to-back episodes starting at 9 p.m. Eastern on ABC.