Glory Daze premieres on TBS Tuesday, Nov. 16, at 9 p.m. (Provided by TBS)
Take Animal House and subtract the nudity, the explicit humor and anything else funny but not TBS audience appropriate and you get the new series Glory Daze.
Set in 1986, Glory Daze is about four guys rushing the Omega Sigma fraternity. The main characters are freshmen at Hayes (Haze, get it?) University where they are told that if they do not join a fraternity they might as well “sit alone and build volcanoes out of their mashed potatoes.”
The plot centers around the adventures of Joel, the pre-med student, Eli, the desperate virgin, Jason, the super preppy conservative who always has a sweater tied around his shoulders, and Brian, a star baseball player; four unlikely friends who agree to rush the same fraternity and drink together out of “The Beast,” an industrial-sized beer bong with nine hoses.
While the cast is mainly comprised of newcomers, a couple familiar faces have been sprinkled in. Brad Garrett (Everybody Loves Raymond) plays Joel’s father who crashes his car at the sight of sorority girls and Tim Meadows (Saturday Night Live, Mean Girls) plays a recently divorced liberal professor who takes a lot of pleasure in humiliating his students.
You would be hard-pressed to find a TV show or movie that relies as heavily on college life stereotypes as Glory Daze. Not only do the main characters fill all of the generic male roles but the frat house itself is depicted as an Eden of booze, weed and loose sorority sisters.
The screenwriters have also worked really hard to test the boundaries between a made-for-TV audience and an R-rated film. Unfortunately for them, it makes the jokes fall flat because they cannot see them all the way through.
The show seems set up to only last a single season. The boys go through the process of pledging Omega Sig and then what? They continue to frat hard.
This is compelling material; definitely enough to base a long running show off of. At least they started in 1986, maybe they could show us what happens to male stereotypes post-grad.
The only redeeming quality of the show is its soundtrack. The beats of the ‘80s rock on in Glory Daze, while the rest of the show is less appealing than the big hair and acid-wash jeans the characters sport.
