Ugly Americans, is a show about a twentysomething social worker living in an alternate version of Manhattan that is inhabited by demons, zombies, and all sorts of other crazy products of madcap sci-fi and horror movies. Billed as a horror-comedy, the show has a grotesque visual style spawned by Wonder Showzen‘s Aaron Augenblick that’s both off-putting and inviting, but its lack of memorable laughs leaves little for viewers to latch onto.

Nothing in the series has topped the 20-second throwaway joke from the pilot in which INS agents storm in on a sweatshop manned by a bunch of giant chicken people squawking “It’s a raid!” in subtitled chicken speak. You don’t see stuff like that on TV very often, and unfortunately, you don’t see it on Ugly Americans often either.

You can’t really fault a show for being different, but aside from its adult subject matter, Ugly Americans isn’t really that much different from the recently resurrected Futurama. Both shows detail the lives of an average Joe living in a mixed up world filled with mutants and freaks; both include alcoholic, nonhuman best friends; and both have love interests that kind of want to kill the main characters.

That isn’t to say that Ugly Americans rips off the cult favorite, but when you see the ongoing success of Futurama, which embraces its wacked-out universe and uses it as a tool to take wry social jabs at our own world, it becomes clear that Ugly Americans‘ interesting setting is just sort of there for the sake of being weird. Ugly Americans airs on Wednesdays at 10:30 p.m. on Comedy Central. Grade: C-

–Peter Cleary, WNHS-TV