8 Simple Rules

From TeeVeePedia, the Internet TV Encyclopedia.

8 Simple Rules To Seducing My Teen Age Daughters, later known simply as 8 Simple Rules, was a sitcom on ABC.

Set in Detroit (even though you never saw any black people on the show), country singer Tex Ritter starred as Jack Tripper, a family man desperate to marry off his obnoxious teenage daughters, played by Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. A horny bastard himself in his younger years, Tripper would school his daughters' prospective boyfriends on the best way to convince the girls to have sex with them -- no mean feat, since both of them were angry, ultra-feminist lesbians. Steven Seagal played Mrs. Tripper, occasionally dispatching Jack with a quick judo kick.

When Ritter died unexpectantly early in the show's run, the show's ratings actually went up, so the producers decide to kill off a character a year. By the time Barney the Mailman bit the dust in the twelfth season's finale, 8 Simple Rules was the number one show on television, finally topping The Howard Beale Show on UBS. But the producers got greedy; in the following season's opener, the girls broke into a nuclear missile silo and wiped out the entire Western Hemisphere, but ratings were disappointing. The final episode, aired in 2004, consisited solely of the girls vomiting in a dimly-lit fallout shelter as they died of radiation sickness. (Still, it was more fun to watch than Drew Carey.)