I don't have too much new to say about Black-Ish this week. The three adult leads remain strong given limited material, though Fishburne remains underutilized. The children remain painfully bad (perhaps more noticeable here as the youngest girl was given a lot of good material to ruin with stilted delivery). The narration remains excessive, and the jokes remain surprisingly infrequent but occasionally sublime (the sequence with Andre in his car at the bus stop springs to mind). Perhaps most significantly, though, Black-Ish remains totally toothless.
Read moreNvTV 10: "In the Mix, On the Books, and In the Freezer" or "Three Places I'd Rather Be Than Watching Manhattan Love Story"
Contrary to popular belief, I love TV, and any show I sit down to watch, I want to enjoy. I'm really trying to be an optimist here, so let's start with the good, before I mention how I quite literally enjoyed the Botox commercial during Manhattan Love Story more than Manhattan Love Story.
1) They finally gave Kurt Fuller something to do.
2) At the end of the episode, there is a long scene, I'd estimate about four minutes or so. The beginning and the end of that scene are terrible, but there's a solid ninety seconds or so in the middle where Manhattan Love Story is something other than the television equivalent of a smoldering pile of burning corpses caked in the blood and feces of black plague victims. For ninety seconds (nearly two minutes if you throw in the two short Kurt Fuller scenes!), MLS is actually pretty good.
Unfortunately, it's a twenty-two minute show, and the other twenty minutes are every bit the comedy oubliette that the last twenty-two minutes were.
NvTV 9: "Un-Tag My Heart" and Selfie's Awareness
I'm not gonna lie to you, folks: this "review all the new sitcoms" project is not going as well as I'd hoped. I've seen six shows (and eight episodes) now, and I can't, in a vacuum, recommend a single one of them. I can't honestly say that I'd be sticking around for any of them if I wasn't doing this (though perhaps my love for John Mulaney and Kate Walsh, respectively, would buy their shows a little more leash)… except for Selfie.
It isn't great yet, or even really good, but it's got the strongest core, arguably the highest ceiling, and easily the bravest creative team so far. The second episode, "Un-Tag my Heart," is marked improvement from the first, and more importantly demonstrates an awareness about which parts of the first episode worked, and which didn't.
NvTV8: "Mulaney" and Regret
Oh, Mulaney. I had such high hopes for you. Sure, I know MLS and A to Z were gonna be hard to get through. I know Cristela and The McCarthys are unlikely to be much better. I knew Bad Judge and Selfie were going to be risky bets at best… but you, Mulaney, you were supposed to be the slam dunk. Great writer, awesome cast, tried-and-true format… you were secretly my favorite, the one I had the highest hopes for.
Why do you hurt me so when I show you nothing but love?
Read moreNvTV 7: Bad Judge "Pilot" and What Might Have Been
Kate Walsh is very, very good. Bad Judge, sadly, isn't. But it could have been. Originally conceived by Will Ferrell's famed sidekick Adam McCay (and executive produced by Ferrell), Bad Judge was no doubt originally designed to follow in the footsteps of Bad Teacher and Bad Santa. It likely would have been very good at that, with Walsh in the lead supported by Ryan Hansen (Veronica Mars, Party Down), an actor who's so good with his face that he can get a laugh just by entering a room or raising an eyebrow to the point where you wonder if that might be his gimmick… but then he's just as good when it's his turn to talk, and you realize the guy's just fundamentally funny. That makes him a perfect compliment to Walsh, who sports a similar skill set, although in contrast to Hansen's laid-back hilarity she's at her comic best when pushed into neurotic frenzy.
Alas, the network panicked and instead of a lovably deplorable anti-hero, we have a nurturing, largely generic leading lady. Walsh is so good she saves a lot of it, but the show has an identity crisis even she can't solve, as half the episode was re-shot to make her into this new, loving character and half of it was left over from her days as a me-first hedonist. The show runner responsible for the pilot has already been fired, and replaced, so there will soon be yet a third interpretation on the table. Hopefully it will be one that tips the show in one direction or the other, as the leads are strong enough to make it work as either… but it can't survive as both.