Another quick one here, but I'll likely (maybe?) be back to full length pieces next week, assuming any of these damned shows feel like evolving at all.
First up, Bad Judge maintained its improvement from last week, but didn't add to it (though it was nice to see Ryan McPartlin again). The cast is excellent, the writing is just good enough, and it's an overall pleasant experience but by no means a masterpiece. Kate Walsh is so incredibly strong that it almost doesn't matter what she's being asked to do, from triangle chokes to forgetting a stenographers name, she spins it into gold. Big thumbs up for her, mild thumbs up for her show.
A to Z is starting to piss me off, though.
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.
NvTV 11: Black-Ish "The Nod" and Full House vs. Chris Rock
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.
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