Okay, so I'm going to try and turn my many, many opinions about television into a weekly blog item. I talk and think about shows so much, I might as well write about them too.
So introducing the first category of TV impressions...NEW COMEDY!
Now, I am a college student and do not have time to watch every show on earth, so these are just a select number of shows I chose to tune in to. I will also have a post up soon about some of my favorite returning shows, so look out for that.
Up All Night: Wednesdays, NBC
I may be alone in thinking this, but this looks like the most promising new show of the season! Following the debacle of Running Wilde, it’s nice to see Will Arnett in a role that humanizes him but allows him to make some of the same kind of goofy-yet-jerky mistakes that made GOB my favorite character in Arrested Development. I also think Christina Applegate is underrated as a comic actress—her chemistry with Maya Rudolph and Will Arnett make this whole show sparkle.
I also think there are several things about this show that are commendable on a kind of social commentary level. Reagan and Chris might be having a rough time adjusting to true adulthood and parenthood, but they aren’t the typical juvenile, incompetent types that would have populated this show perhaps five years ago. They really try hard and do their best—and the greatest part is that this couple is not constantly at each other’s throats. I don’t think the inversion of Chris being a stay-at-home dad and Reagan being a working mom is necessarily worthy of commendation, but I do think the show’s portrayal of their relationship and partnership is.
New Girl: Tuesdays, FOX
I had mixed feelings going into this. I admit I am not the biggest fan of Zooey Deschanel—I used to love her, back when she did The Good Girl and her short stint on Weeds, but since then my respect and admiration of her has pretty seriously waned. I also think Fox may have overexposed this show a bit, but I guess the tremendous ratings the premiere got will contend that it was a smart move.
Zooey as Jess was so-so…I found many of her lines/hijinks to be hit-or-miss (for instance: loved the “your boob is resting on a plate of chicken” bit, did not so much love the jeggings bit) and her comic timing is just not as good as it could be. However, I am a huge fan of Max Greenfield from his Veronica Mars days, so I might watch just to see how his “douche-jar-filling” character evolves.
My one major grevience to air, though, has to do with the first scene. Getting dumped while naked? I realize Forgetting Sarah Marshall was not exactly Judd Apatow’s most well-known piece, but I should think that seeing Jason Segal’s wang would rank pretty high in Moments of Pop Culture. Enough that this opening seems ripped off.
2 Broke Girls: Mondays, CBS
So, I have to say this is the show I was most excited about during pilot season. This has something to do with the fact that it is one of the few shows created by a lady , but is mainly due to my ongoing love affair with Kat Dennings…yes, she may play the same snarky I’m-too-self-aware-to-really-be-a-hipster character, but I think she is gorgeous and I love how genuine and awkward she was in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. She was even charming as the confused, outcast, hot-for-teacher ingénue in Daydream Nation, despite my many problems with that movie. All this to say my love of Kat Dennings knows no bounds.
Or so I thought. Because after the first two minutes of 2 Broke Girls, I started to think that maybe boring, blond Beth Behrs is the true star of this show. And I know it’s not Kat Denning’s fault that her first lines were so overwritten and cringe-worthy, but she’s the one on screen delivering them. For anyone who did not see this show or somehow missed the opening, we basically open on Dennings’s character Max at work as a waitress in a dingy Brooklyn diner and suddenly—le gasp—some customer is rude and unappreciative of her! So Max goes all snarky bitch on their ass and takes them to task in a way-too-long monologue that cuts them down to size for daring to snap at her.
Okay, I agree, snapping at your waitress is a huge no-no, but a.) Max would be so used to this—and worse—that it probably would not even register at this point. And b.) one of her lines is literally “I wear knit hats because it’s cold outside, you wear knit hats because of Coldplay.” This line is straight terrible, and I hope they fire whoever let it out of the first draft. Not only is it trying way, way too hard (I was frankly surprised that the offending hipsters didn’t start laughing immediately) but also because anyone who has ever met a hipster knows that Coldplay is just about the last band on Earth hipsters admit to liking. Coldplay is awesome I think they are talented and wonderful, but hipsters mainly try to deny the universal pleasantness of their sound in favor of weird sonically dissonant bands like Animal Collective, which literally frighten my cat out of the room when I put them on.
All this to say that this is a show about young, hip financially insecure ladies living in NYC that is ostensibly written by a youngish, hip lady comedian, and yet it somehow still seems like it is written by a forty-something white man who is trying to imagine what young, hip ladies might sound like based on information cobbled together from Wikipedia and the movie Juno.
This is not to say there was nothing redeeming about this pilot. In fact, I think in term of structure and plot-arc, this was one of the best pilots. It set up the situation nicely (two very dissimilar girls working and living together due to unlikely circumstances) and shows the gradual beginnings of a bond between them. I think the premise is cute, but could fall victim to too many forced sitcom-y tropes. I guess we’ll have to see!
That's all for now! Tell me what you thought about these shows, or if there are any new shows I should be checking out. And look out for my First Impressions of returning favorites, including Parks & Recreation, Glee, The Office and more!
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