CBS’s
longstanding hit comedy, How I Met Your
Mother, went off the air last month and already sitcoms are lining up to
try and fill the televisual void it will leave.
And void there will be. It takes
the right type of sitcom to replace one of its legend ancestors, but it can
happen. (I’d argue that How I Met Your Mother was that right
type of comedy that was able to fill the void left by Friends).
I
could join the voices of the many who have chimed in about the ending of How I Met Your Mother, but it didn’t
thrill nor disappoint me to the point that I feel one more opinion floating
around on the web is necessary. (The
spoilers I discussed in my previous post on the show did end up being true but
the emotional consequences of that plot turn didn’t turn out to be enormous as
I anticipated).
As I
readied myself for the end of my favorite sitcom, I tried to look forward to
the new ones being launched mid-season.
ABC’s Mixology came on the
scene first and I liked it immediately.
CBS’s Friends with Better Lives
debuted immediately after the last episode of How I Met Your Mother (a smart marketing decision, one obviously
linked to their assumption that this show could replace the former), and I was
less than impressed.
Mixology is different. And I need me some variation when it comes
to the standard sitcom formula. As its
opening voice over announces, it is the story of 10 strangers, one night, one
bar, and the ridiculous things we do for love.
It is set up much like romantic comedies (full of their self-helpy,
prescriptive rules on dating do’s and don’ts) with tons of meet cutes and
exaggerated battle of the sex dating scenarios.
But there’s something a bit interesting about the mutation that happens
when you transport that genre into the sitcom.
What we get is not one couple whose “will they/won’t they” trajectory we
will follow throughout a program (which is the televisual norm: Friends’s
Rachel and Ross; Who’s the Boss’s
Angela & Tony), and it is not even five couples that we get, but rather we
get these ten characters who have various encounters with one another to the
point where we’re not sure who will end up with whom at the end of the night
(hence the suspense and plot trajectory).
Each episode receives the title
of two characters, implying its focus will be slightly more set on that
possible pairing, but the show immediately shows that it won’t keep its
pairings static as we’ve already had two episodes that showcase different
romantic possibilities for one male character (e.g. “Jessica & Bruce” and “Bruce
& Fab”).
It’s
also the temporal factor that intrigues me.
I absolutely love that it happens all in one night. This temporal repression seems to really work
(after all the entire season of How I Met
was one wedding weekend). What the show
does to make up for this limited temporal span is integrate flashbacks, which I
always find work really well for sitcoms.
As each character was introduced we received a quick backstory on each starting
with their births and family lives. In
later episodes as they stumbled into some romantic road block, we get a
flashback to this habitual relationship flaw they have in order to see how they
repeat or overcome it.
And I
like the setting. Comedy requires familiar
settings and a purposeful play with stereotypical behaviors. A bar/club and the single dating scene allows
for both. Although maybe they are a bit
too cliché, I found myself laughing at the scenes of drunk girls crying on the
shoulders of unsuspecting strangers in the bathroom because I’ve witnessed such
occurrences more times than I can count.
I don’t
know why I am fascinated by popular culture products focused on the dating
scene. Maybe because I pretty much
bypassed that entire stage of life. All
of my long term relationships evolved out of close knit friend groups and most
of them were with people I had known for at least ten years prior to
dating. I never went on a blind date, never
Internet dated, and I didn’t socialize in large groups of girls who frequented
bars in the hopes of finding love or lust.
But despite the fact that I seldom relate personally to these narratives,
they amuse me and suck me in despite their sometimes problematic gender
politics. And at least they make me
think and critique. This is more than I
can say of the other sitcom I mentioned.
There’s
really little to say about Friends with
Better Lives. I wanted to like it
because I am a product of the 90s and 00s and loved Dawson’s Creek like only a melodramatic teen and young adult
can. Therefore, I always want to support
the afterlife of its cast, such as James Van Der Beek (Dawson). So I tried to like The B in Apartment 23 when it was on last year, but didn’t. And I was glad to see he was cast in this new
sitcom. Maybe I just don’t like Van Der
Beek in comedy but prefer him more angst-filled roles. Or maybe, truth be told, I always liked the rest
of the cast of Dawson’s Creek a lot
more (e.g. Joshua Jackson and Katie Holmes); I was “Team Pacey” after all. But, I digress. The show has the normal set-up of being
focused on a group of friends: a married
couple, a newly engaged couple, the newly divorced bachelor, and the
rarely-lucky-in-love single career woman.
But, besides for the humor involving a breast pump (which just strikes a
humorous note for me having just retired mine), most of the scenes between this
ensemble cast seemed forced. It is early
and shows sometimes take time to develop so maybe I’m being too hard on it but
my first instinct is: nothing new to see
here.
Sitcoms
continue to be one of the more affordable televisual genres so it is more likely to see a comedy show stay with us
on the air for years at a time. So my
hope is that writers and producers continue to give us some smart, quality
shows in this genre so that what we’re getting (for years at a time) is worth
watching.
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