President Dale Gilchrist, played by Bill Pullman, evades reporters in ‘1600 Penn.’ (NBC Universal)

Jon Lovett, a former White House speechwriter who is embarking on a new path as a television writer with the new NBC sitcom 1600 Penn, apparently had a few too many nasty run-ins with reporters during his time as President Obama’s personal joke-slinger.

In the pilot episode of 1600 Penn, which depicts a bumbling first family in a White House comedy of errors, the president, played by Bill Pullman, gives a firmly anti-media warning to his children: “What did I always tell you? Reporters are the worst people in the world.”

The second line is said in unison by the president’s children, played by Martha MacIsaac and Josh Gad, who helped Lovett create the show.

Were reporters really so nasty to Lovett in his years working for Obama? After all, plenty of chuckles were elicited by the scripts Lovett wrote for the president’s addresses to several White House Correspondents Dinners. If people in this industry are going to laugh at his jokes, the least he could do is not insult us on a nationally broadcast sitcom.

But I digress. At a screening of his new show yesterday at the National Press Club, Lovett insisted he wasn’t talking about all reporters, at least not the ones sitting in the room. And certainly the journalists who work for NBC News and MSNBC are in his good graces, or at least were persuaded by their parent company to pop up in cameos throughout the pilot episode, which airs tonight at 9:30 p.m.

Lovett quit the White House in 2011 to chase his Hollywood dreams. At the screening yesterday, he insisted writing about the presidency was not his first idea. “I wanted to write about anything but the White House,” he said, adding that he was sure that anything he wrote about the executive mansion would be a “long scream.”

Nevertheless, agents and managers matched him up with Gad and Jason Winer, a producer of the ABC series Modern Family, who wanted to do a show about “an ordinary family in an extraordinary place.” The White House is certainly that, but how do madcap plots that seem fetched from not-so-distant ’90s family-based sitcoms like Full House and Step By Step hold up in a fictionalized fishbowl?

Not well, I must report. Perhaps we’re so jaded that a sitcom plot about unplanned pregnancies or a layabout, ambition-free son in his late 20s seem hoary in this day and age, but they do. And placing them in a White House setting does little to amplify the scant humor. If anything, it scrapes the laughs away and exposes even more baldly 1600 Penn‘s single trick: goofing on the way the White House is covered.

Not that such a thing shouldn’t be mocked. The tabloid-like manner in which the White House—much less presidents and their families—are covered by seemingly upstanding news organizations is ripe for the ribbing, but a successful sitcom needs more punching bags. The press materials and the moderator of yesterday’s event, National Press Club President Theresa Werner, continually reminded us that 1600 Penn is “NBC’s answer to Modern Family,” even though I was under the assumption that The New Normal, a series about an unconventional family including Ellen Barkin as a gorgon grandmother. Whatever.

It’s kind of a shame, though, that 1600 Penn doesn’t do more with Pullman’s comic wit. This man was Lone Star, for goodness sakes! To say nothing of the fact that in his first outing as an American president, he also saved the world from a destructive alien invasion. But his character in 1600 Penn, Dale Gilcrhist, is a long way from Thomas J. Whitmore, the fighter-pilot-turned-president-turned-fighter-pilot in Independence Day. A scene in which Gilchrest consults the Joint Chiefs of Staff for advice on handling his newly pregnant daughter elicits punchlines of uniformed graybeards offering tips on hugs and “daddy blogs” amid discussions of drone strikes. There are enough bad jokes about parenting out there; surely Lovett has the institutional knowledge to give us some good lines about drone strikes!

But Lovett, Gad and Winer want to keep the focus on the family, and therein lies the problem. Given such expansive possibilities—the show is set in the White House!—simply focusing on bad report cards and clumsy child-rearing doesn’t get any funnier just because the environment is disproportionately huge.

Oh, well. Presidencies—real or fictional—can be disappointing, especially on NBC, which droned on for seven years of the painfully indecisive Bartlet administration on The West Wing. The first family on 1600 Penn, however, doesn’t seem destined for two terms. Hell, it might not last longer than President Obama’s latest cabinet nomination.