I did see potential down the road, and we did get it in episodes like episode #8 “Teddy, Takes Off” where we learned about Jack and Teddy’s strained relationship.

I just wish Fox had given it some more time to find an audience, but, then they wouldn’t be Fox if they had.

As you mentioned, part of the problem was the cliches but there were other issues. One thing is that all the characters were fairly one-dimensional aside from Jack. I’m sure they were written this way because the cast was so large that they wanted to quickly imprint the characters on the viewer in a memorable way. Unfortunately, I think this made the characters hard to identify with and made the show relatively farcical when it focused on some of the peripheral characters.

The other problem was that it’s harder to understand or track the relationships between the characters when so many of them are interacting for such a brief time. The characters needed to be paired up (a la Friends – the large cast worked well there because it was broken off into pairs with two satellite characters moving between the pairs – though I actually don’t like Friends) so the relationships could be easier to see and the characters would be more sharply defined from the interaction between each member of each pair.

I think the show may have been better after it had a chance to mature but I wouldn’t see it as something that showed strong potential just out of the gate.