Welcome to a new Wildcard Wednesday! This week, I’m sharing some thoughts on Carpoolers (2007-2008, ABC), one of the better single-season single-camera broadcast network sitcoms from the late 2000s. As you’ll note, I’m retaining the straightforward template of a Potpourri entry — from which this show is a deserved pop-out!
CARPOOLERS (October 2007 – March 2008, ABC)
Premise: Four suburban guys become friends when they carpool to work.
Cast: Jerry O’Connell, Fred Goss, Faith Ford, Jerry Minor, Tim Peper, Allison Munn, T.J. Miller
Writing Staff: Bruce McCulloch, Marsh McCall, Steve Leff, Emily Cutler, Warren Lieberstein & Halsted Sullivan, Gary Murphy, Kit Boss, Norm Hiscock
Thoughts: Don’t let the high-concept logline fool you — this is basically just a hangout show about four guys who live in the same suburban neighborhood and work in the same office building. The whole carpool angle is merely a premised hook and an excuse to congregate four theoretically different people who otherwise wouldn’t be close, uniting them in a male-focused ensemble that can go back and forth between their jobs and their homes. Design-wise, I think it tries a little too hard to be fresh and unique, for the carpooling ends up as something of an extraneous device — and certainly not a flowing font of story. But that’s ultimately okay, for the show does fine by its characters and its comedy, with ideas that are fairly fresh and/or made to be unique. Although the four men predictably represent basic domestic archetypes — the goofy husband with the sensible wife, the naïve newlywed, the womanizing divorcé, and the frazzled dad with a passel of kids — they’re pretty distinct opposite each other, capable of delineating appropriate plots and their own sources of humor, with room to find both sympathy and conflict as a result of their differences. And the cast obviously helps here with the laughs — Jerry O’Connell, in particular, stands out as the womanizer, while Faith Ford gives sitcom gravitas to her role as the bumbling husband’s sensible wife, and T.J. Miller earns easy hahas as her son, a parody of Napoleon Dynamite. In tandem with this decent foundation for character (aided by the performances), the writing — led by Bruce McCulloch of The Kids In The Hall and Saturday Night Live — is naturally funny and produces several good setups in just a short period, suggesting that the show would have even gotten more amusing with time, boasting a Seinfeld-ian sense of the small but mounting comic idea. But unfortunately, with disappointing ratings, ABC declined to bring the show back into production after the 2007-2008 WGA strike, leaving Carpoolers stuck on the road, with only 13 episodes behind it. They’re not earth-shattering, but collectively, I think this is one of the better short-lived network sitcoms of the 2000s.
Episode Count: 13 episodes produced and broadcast.
Episodes Seen: All 13.
Key Episodes: #6: “The Code” (11/13/07)
#8: “First Fight” (01/22/08)
#10: “Wheels Of Fortune” (02/12/08)
Why: #6 enjoys the best use of the actual “carpoolers” high concept, as the foursome gets into a feud with another group of carpoolers — it’s certainly one of the funniest episodes — while #8 enjoys several funny ideas that converge in a Seinfeld-ian way, and #10 boasts a capable display of its characters in contrast and some riotous physical comedy that I think would have become more of the show’s calling card had it been able to continue.
Come back next week for a new Wildcard! And stay tuned Monday for a musical rarity!