You don’t have to have a teenage daughter to hate the new Fox sitcom “I Hate My Teenage Daughter.”
Or, as co-creator Sherry Bilsing Graham put it, “I don’t think you have to have a teenage daughter to relate to the problems that the show addresses and the situations that they find themselves in.”
Adds star Jaime Pressly: “You can be a divorcée. You can be a single parent. You can be the sister or brother of a teenage ass. I mean, it’s really relatable to pretty much everybody that I’ve come in contact with, whether they are married or divorced or have children or they were, I was that 14 year old, difficult 14 year old. I think it pretty much runs the gamut, and it’s one of those things where for 30 minutes everybody, especially parents, are gonna be able to sit down and escape for a second and realize they’re not alone, that they’re not the only ones in that hormone hell that they’re in with their children, and see that, you know first of all, real comedy comes from drama, and real drama, while you’re in it, you’re blind.
“Hindsight’s 20/20, so when you’re in it, you kind of don’t know what you’re supposed to do or how to handle it, and kids these days have so much technology and are so much smarter than we were,” Pressly says. “They’re talking over our head and Googling and tweeting and doing all these things. So just seeing two people who have no idea how to do any of that and couldn’t be further from their daughters as far as popularity or pretty or clothes or whatever, I mean, we were complete opposites.”
Neither Graham nor Ellen Kreamer have teenage daughters. But, Graham joked, “I have a 11 year old son who acts like a teenage daughter.”
“The show’s called ‘I Hate My Teenage Daughter,’ ” she added later. “At any given time in the day out of frustration you may say that, but the heart of the relationship between these mothers and daughters is, of course, the great deal of love.”
“It’s really meant to say under your breath,” Pressly says of the caustic title. “It’s one of those points where they just drive you to the edge and you just want to throw them, and you’re like, ‘God, I hate my teenage daughter.’ You don’t really. You love them dearly, of course. But every parent has that moment when they want to break down and just scream. It’s not like this is something nobody’s heard of or been through before.”