Company in town this week, so I'm doing some abbreviated reviews this week:
Manhattan Love Story remains a televised abortion, only less funny.
Selfie likewise spent the week treading water, as the character work remains mostly good and the jokes remain mostly not. The supporting cast is shaping up nicely, but the show simply needs to be funnier if it wants to hold anyone's attention.
NVTV 15: Mulaney "The Doula" and Small Progress
I don't have a ton to say about Mulaney this week, but what I do have can be pretty readily boiled down into three points:
1) This episode was overall significantly better than the pilot, with Mulaney seeming much more comfortable on camera and the average joke quality going up.
2) Mulaney still isn't nearly as funny as it should be, and it's far too willing to sell out its own characters and universe for a cheap laugh (my sitcom pet peeve).
3) Mulaney is at its best when it's coming from a mean, cynical, and incisive place. If it ever decides to live there instead of just visiting a few times an episode, it will be an excellent show.
NVTV 14: Cristela and Pleasant Surprises
"It's not funny!" - Cristela's sister
"It would be if you'd just laugh!" -Cristela
That's pretty much the show in a nutshell.
NVTV 13: Bad Judge "Meteor Shower" and It's About Damn Time
Now that's more like it! After watching every other show this week more or less tread water, I cannot tell you how refreshing it was to see Bad Judge fix basically every problem I had with the pilot.
The second episode, "Meteor Shower," does away with the annoying kid, makes you laugh, and most importantly, commits to an identity for both its main character and the show as a whole. The character is a spiteful, insecure hedonist that's oddly sympathetic, and the show? It's a live-action cartoon.
That's not an insult, either. "Live action cartoon" is a perfectly fine sitcom route, and it's worked, to varying degrees, for everything from 30 Rock to certain seasons of Scrubs to every single episode, good and bad, of the vastly overrated but sometimes charming Parks and Recreation. For Bad Judge, this is a cartoon universe with minimal consequences for big actions like imprisoning an entire courtroom or attacking a stranger with an axe, and yet still one that takes its characters and their emotions seriously. This is a massive step in the right direction.
Kate Walsh no longer has to heroically blend two completely separate characters, as the new show runner has given her a unified version of the mess we saw in the pilot. Judge Wright is, way deep down, probably a good person but she doesn't have her shit together even a little bit, and her first instinct in all cases is spite. Sometimes this works out for her (getting control of her super famous defendant), sometimes it doesn't (flipping off the paparazzi), but either way it's usually funny. Walsh is a good enough actress to make Wright a human being even beneath the cartoon shenanigans, and here, much moreso than in the pilot, she's backed by an able supporting cast.
NvTv 12: A to Z's "Big Glory" and Silver Linings
One of my least favorite sitcom plots is any plot which requires characters who are not normally idiots to behave like idiots in order to function. There is an exception to this, when the characters have a good, in-character reason to behave like idiots (frequent source of this: a character's ex they have no power against). "Big Glory" was not one of those exceptions.
Much like the pilot, "Big Glory" has some truly terrible character moments for its leads. It's not quite as bad on that front for two reasons, namely that at least in this episode they're idiots in equal measure, and this time, eventuallyt, they both realize they're behaving like punchlines instead of human beings. On the other hand, where the pilot remained watchable despite its god awful character arcs thanks to a few very strong jokes, "Big Glory" took a step backwards on the comedy front.