TV reviews: ‘Worst Week,’ ‘Gary Unmarried’
“Worst Week” (Mondays, CBS): I laughed a lot at the pilot episode of this fast-paced sitcom, and I was impressed by its enthusiastic embracing of farce and slapstick. It’s a single-camera show (i.e., no studio audience) about a hapless man named Sam who meets, and consistently screws up in front of, his fiancee’s parents. Yes, it’s like “Meet the Parents” — except that unlike Greg Focker, Sam is a likable underdog whose eagerness to please is endearing, not annoying. So many sitcoms are ultimately about guys being screw-ups, so it’s nice to see one that admits up front that that’s all it’s about, and then runs with it. The pilot involved many delightful elements of farce (miscommunication, people presumed dead who are not dead, etc.), and while I got squirmy a few times when I realized how bad things were about to get for Sam, I soon started seeing that as one of the show’s virtues: It’s a hilarious story about a perpetual trainwreck, and thank goodness it’s happening to someone else and not me.
“Gary Unmarried” (Wednesdays, CBS): … And now, after that refreshing bit of humor, we’re back to the same old boring thing. “Gary Unmarried” stars Jay Mohr as a newly divorced housepainter sharing custody of his two children with his ex-wife (who’s now dating their marriage counselor, haw haw!). It’s another bumbling-dad/horny-men/sass-mouthed-teenagers/bitter-ex-wife TV show, and it stands apart from the thousand similar shows in no discernible way. I chuckled a couple times during the pilot — not enough to watch the show again.
September 28th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
“Worst Week” is another British tv show we’ve appropriated here in the states, so I’m hoping that it lives up to the original! Your review is encouraging, so I’ll have to watch it.
September 28th, 2008 at 10:58 pm
I agree about Gary Unmarried being just like all of the other sitcoms, Worst Week had potential- but it was way too out there for me. I mean, obviously the guy is going to mess up (we can tell that from the title), but it was just so UNREALISTIC. I predicted the last scene before he went to fix the lights when he was holding the candle. Honestly, if you can predict things that should rarely happen, it’s pretty bad. I just thought they went overboard with it. I like Kurtwood Smith and he would play a good dad who would hate almost any guy having sex with his daughter. Why do they have to make the guy do 20 things that would never happen in a 21 minute show to make it funny…………. I’ll give it another week but I doubt I can take much more.
September 30th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
I had high hopes for “Worst Week”, and after missing it last Monday I actually watched it online on the CBS website. I’m with Rob D. It was way too unrealistic for me, and I stopped watching after he peed on the turkey. What the H was that all about?
September 30th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
I think you have to accept the show on its own terms, which is as a farce. Farce involves improbable events that are then dealt with (in good farce, anyway) in a logical manner. That is to say, while it’s unlikely that Event X would happen, if it DID happen, people would respond the way they do here. Furthermore, Event X, while improbable, would, if it occurred, lead naturally to Event Y, and so on. “Unrealistic” is irrelevant to a farce. “Logical” is what matters, and just about everything in “Worst Week” is logical. It still may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but there you go.
October 10th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
Well, that actually makes a lot of sense. Don’t ever think about starting your own religion, Eric, because you are just too darn logical, and I would probably join.
I guess it wasn’t my cup of tea then, or maybe it really did just seem too much like “Meet the Parents” to me.