End of Season Comedy Blog

Posted by The TV Critic on 15 June 2011 | 0 Comments

Tags: Mad Love, Cougar Town, Perfect Couples, Traffic Light, Happy Endings

Hey again,

I wanted to write a bit more about the comedy shows on TV after my podcast with Brando (http://www.thetvcritic.org/talking-comedy-with-brando-podcast-8-6-201/). We covered the major shows but didn't talk as much about the minor comedies.

For some reason this was the season when every network tried to launch their own Friends and I found it interesting to see so many similar shows all appear at once.

Happy Endings (ABC)

The only one of these comedies to actually survive the season was Happy Endings which starred (amongst others) Elisha Cuthbert (24), Zachary Knighton (Flashforward) and Eliza Coupe (Scrubs).

My complaint with a lot of these comedies is that they didn't give us a jumping in point which set the stage for who these people were. I'm sure you remember the Friends pilot where Ross learns that his wife is gay and pregnant and Rachel walks out on her wedding. Well Happy Endings went one better and actually had two of its characters break up on their wedding day.

Sadly this was not a good starting point for a comedy. It could have been but the serious ramifications of such a breakup were ignored and Dave and Alex were way too comfortable spending time together in the same group. We didn't really get a good jumping off point for many of the other characters either. The show just went full speed into dialogue with the gang all mocking one another. I never felt the characters were established enough for any of the quick fire banter to actually be funny. The writers seemed so desperate to get to the jokes that they couldn't take even spend one scene being serious and showing us who these people were.

The sad part is that the actors did a really good job most of the time. Casey Wilson's Penny was plausibly single in a way that could have been annoying and Adam Pally's Max genuinely didn't seem like he cared about anything. We'll see how season two pans out but I suspect it will be all quick-fire one liners and no actual characterization.

Perfect Couples (NBC)

I felt this was very similar. A slightly older cast and probably slightly less funny. But again the acting was good and the scripting was much too quick. I can't help but feel Scrubs is to blame for a lot of this. Season one of Scrubs was so good that it seems to have spawned a whole style of comedy that only worked for that one season. The whacky exaggerated world of Sacred Heart worked for John Dorian's first year when the rules and structure of a hospital were firmly in place. In the everyday world of Happy Endings or Perfect Couples the exaggerated and elastic dialogue just seems fake to me with no pause for an actual joke or bit of performance comedy to breathe.

Cougar Town (ABC)

I'm doing these in stream-of-consciousness order and talking about Scrubs naturally leads to Cougar Town. I saw the season finale where the gang went to Hawaii and unlike most shows I felt confident that I didn't need to see the rest of the season to know exactly what was going on. Again the style of comedy just falls flat for me. Every line out of everyone's mouth is either whacky silliness or an insult about someone's established traits. "You drink too much", "Well at least I'm not a loser", "Well I may be a loser but at least I'm sober" and so on. None of those insults are taken personally and so it all just feels so meaningless.

I do understand why people would enjoy Cougar Town. The characters are all friendly and silly and there's nothing challenging or grating about it as light entertainment. But for me there is nothing real about it and that drains it of any humour. Like Scrubs it felt to me like all the characters were spinning their wheels just keeping the universe basically the same while people occasionally changed jobs, locations or partners.

Traffic Light (FOX)

Now this was something a bit different. Unlike all the other comedies the characters here had actual conversations. Yes there was plenty of mocking but the interactions were given time to develop and the characters seemed far more like real people. Nelson Franklin's Adam and David Denman's Mike were particularly effective at times. The problem of course was that when the show introduced traditional sit com characters (like local Stoner and convenience store worker Tad) they seemed horribly out of place and unrealistic.

I hope the writers behind Traffic Light go on to do something else because I think they had some good ideas.

Mad Love (CBS)

Now this was interesting. Pretty much a rip-off of How I Met Your Mother and yet it in some ways I thought this was the best show of the bunch. I know that says a lot about my tastes but I also think it says something enduring about sit coms. The key to the show was Tyler Labine's character Larry Munsch. Larry was the classic gross, arrogant, womaniser character (with a heart of gold of course). There was nothing original about any of it but Labine did a fine job and through the simple formula of him mocking and taking advantage of his friends I laughed. Not a lot but certainly more than any of the other comedies. Jason Biggs also showed better chops than Josh Radnor in essentially the same role.

I'm not asking for all modern comedies to have the same formula as a 1980s sit com. But there is a simplicity to that formula that is sorely missing from so many of these shows. I believe strongly that a lot of comedy comes from the second before something happens. That anticipation can put you in the mood to laugh at things even when they aren't that funny. These post-Scrubs shows just spew dialogue so quickly that there is never time for that moment of anticipation.

Well that will do for now. I will be blogging about the end of The Killing and writing a review of season one of Justified. Then stay tuned for True Blood (June 26), Breaking Bad (July 17), Curb Your Enthusiasm (July 10) and Entourage (July 24). I am also watching Twin Peaks and Deadwood (both season one) so I can hear Alan Sepinwall's thoughts on both.