There are days when I really understand the whale from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when it said “Oh no, not again”. That’s exactly what I felt when I opened up that envelope from Lions Gate and discovered the copy of Tyler Perry’s House of Payne Volume Six they sent over for me to review. Tyler Perry and I have not gotten along in previous installments (that’s not speaking lightly, either–the last time I took a run at Tyler Perry I called the end result a “putrefacted corpse”), so seeing how he handled the sitcom left me to wonder.

Tyler Perry’s House of Payne follows the Payne family, a family with a whole lot of love and all the standard problems. And a few more problems than that. Going into the sixth season, we’ve got marriages and babies and a whole lot more than that going on. And what we’ve also got is a big heaping dose of Tyler Perry Melodrama.

I can’t give you specifics without spoilers, but let me just say this: by the middle of the second episode of the DVD, I was already to the point where I was predicting plot points. And how am I predicting plot points? Well, it’s not hard, when Tyler Perry is injecting all his standard weapons-grade melodrama into it. It’s not hard to see what’s coming, because so often, it’s the worst thing possible. They’re at the hospital trying to deliver a baby, it’s breach. Get the new mother home, she’s having postpartum depression. Next week, the Paynes try to light a grill for a summer cookout and burn down the house. Grandma comes over for a visit? Whoops, she’s got cancer. And the house is being foreclosed on. But that’s okay, because someone’s a drug addict. Guess who!

Okay, so maybe those last six sentences were a crock. But still. And even the jokes are half stolen. For instance, when one of them is moving a box full of glassware and mispronounces “Fragile” as “Fra-ji-leh”. That was an awesome joke all right…the first time I heard it.

When it was first used in “A Christmas Story”.

Recycled jokes, piles of melodrama…Tyler Perry’s House of Payne is much like his movies. Godawful. Though there is a difference here–at least his show, sometimes, manages to get some laughs. And that’s a distinct plus. While we’re constantly crawling through epic piles of melodrama, as we so often do with Tyler Perry, at least every so often we’re laughing about something. And for Tyler Perry, that’s about as good as it seems to get.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Tyler Perry’s House of Payne Volume Six a five out of ten for being the funniest Tyler Perry thing I’ve seen yet. This is only good in a relative sense, of course, and it’s a lot like comparing a Ford Pinto to a car that’s actively on fire. The Pinto is good, but only because it’s technically driveable and not likely to kill you from oxygen deprivation when you sit in it while it’s on fire. And sitting in a burning car is actually a pretty good analogy of watching a Tyler Perry anything.