My Crazy Friends
I caught the new Matthew Perry sitcom Go On. He's starred in a couple series since Friends left the air and is still trying to catch that magic. Here he's Ryan, a sports radio talk show host who's lost his wife and has been ordered by his boss to attend a support group. Most of the action deals with meeting the other troubled people as well as group leader Lauren, played by Laura Benanti. (Benanti has done TV before but, like Sutton Foster in Bunheads, I think of her as a Broadway musical star.) Ryan--in the patented Matthew Perry style--is a wise-ass who wants nothing to do with the group. At least until the predictable moment where he realizes he does need it. There's a vague indication that Ryan and Lauren will get together in the future, but right now we're just being introduced to them. It also looks like the show may regularly feature actual sports stars.
The writing was good enough to give it another chance when it starts its regularly scheduled airings, but it's hard to go for something when you don't like the setting. Sometimes TV shows are too much into the "twist." Look at shows like Seinfeld, or Modern Family, or Friends, for that matter. The premises were fairly basic--it's the characters and the writing that make them play.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:17 AM
3 Comments:
Your comment made me think of other comedy shows using therapy patients. Apart from the horrible Mixed Nuts in the late 70s, I could only think of one other.
The Bob Newhart show (where he was a psychiatrist not an innkeeper) worked becasue the patients while decidedly odd had a veneer of normality and we were treated to them in measured doses as it was mainly a home and workplace show. The other characters in the Newhart innkeeper show were far nuttier but that worked because they were characters functioning in the world (even Larry and bros) not patients identified as needing psych help.
I trust they will replay the pilot after the olympics are over. From the trailers, the show looked funny. I also thought could have made it - Perry was good but several of the characters they put around him didn't work (especially in my opinion the Stadium owner).
I can't put my finger on what worked in Friends that made him my favorite character in that show. I think it was a the combination of a somewhat tragic figure (Bing had had a tough childhood, though not as tough as Phoebe) and this made him sympathetic, even while he was the smart ass of the group. Of the group, he seemed the most vulnerable, yet he was probably the most successful. I thought it was very funny that season after season, no one really knew what his job was.
As you note, the patients in The Bob Newhart Show were not regulars, but recurring characters. If the show had been built around them, I'm not sure if it would have worked nearly so well. In a way, it was a TV adaptation of Newhart's comedy, where he so often played a relatively rational person in a one-sided conversation with someone much nuttier.
Of course, it's not unusual to have the lead of a sitcom be surrounded by nuts for him to play off, but to have actual characters who are incapable of functioning in society may go too far.
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