Goofball John Magee

[BabyElephant]

Originally Posted by Voxxyn

There are completely different kinds of "bombs". Any given television series will have episodes that aren't up to par with it's usual standards of quality, that's inevitable. And then there are episodes that are disliked not because of any gap in technical quality, but because they do things that seem to only be there to deliberately shock and anger fans.

The problem with IHFUMEUP wasn't that it was 'not as funny' as usual--it's that it was INDEED evil, wrong and malicious.

I think "evil" is a bit strong...it may be a matter of semantics, but evil to me implies things such as the Holocaust or Darfur...or on a smaller level, rape and murder. Being a completely insensitive, selfish jerk doesn't reach anywhere near that level.
Also, I find it very hard to believe that the episode was done "to deliberately shock and anger fans". First of all, while I certainly don't know anyone who works on the show personally, from everything I've ever heard or read, Lauren, Craig et al are great people who would never intentionally hurt anyone's feelings. But even supposing that there were someone on Foster's with that kind of sadistic streak, I still don't think an episode would ever get on the air that was intentionally designed to be hurtful. The people involved with Foster's (the production company, CN, etc.) want to make money, after all, and purposefully upsetting their fan base isn't going to do that...just the opposite, in fact, since it might cause people to stop watching. Just from a strictly business standpoint, it wouldn't make sense. Now I like Frankie a lot, but I won't pretend to understand the depths of feeling this episode brings out, even after all this time. And of course, whatever someone feels about Goofball or the episode as a whole is completely legitimate. Still, given the amount of true evil that exists in the world, maybe some other word could be used.