Welcome to a new Wildcard Wednesday! This week, I’ve got another Sitcom Potpourri, featuring brief commentary on a few short-lived series and picks for the episodes that I think best represent them. For this post, I’m looking at three flops that aired in CBS’ Monday night lineup alongside Two And A Half Men and How I Met Your Mother (among others).
THE CLASS (September 2006 – March 2007, CBS)
Premise: Relationships are renewed after a man reunites his former third grade class.
Cast: Jason Ritter, Lizzy Caplan, Heather Goldenhersh, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Jon Bernthal, Andrea Anders, Sean Maguire, Lucy Punch
Writers: David Crane & Jeffrey Klarik, Mike Sikowitz, Brian Buckner, Steven Molaro, Amanda Lasher, Corey Nickerson, Jonathan Green & Gabe Miller, Sue Murphy, Doty Abrams
Thoughts: The Class is a show that’s better on paper than screen. It’s a polished multi-cam co-created by a former Friends EP, boasting a cast of basically well-delineated characters inside a cute, mostly original premise about reconnected relationships among the now-adult members of a third-grade class. (I said “mostly” because of In Case Of Emergency.) The problem is that this cool premise actually proves unworkable in practice, for by starting with eight adults leading largely separate lives, the show toils to get all its leads together after the pilot, which means it’s rare for the main elements of the series’ situation to be working fully and in tandem. This limits the narrative possibilities, making everything feel segmented and constrained. Indeed, the cast is typically paired inside templated subplots — with four couples emerging, three of which are obviously romantic (or poised to be) — and there’s minimal crossover aside from the link between two sisters. Further overlap must be painstakingly developed (like when one character takes a job with another), but because they don’t have a regular place to gather, with no different duos emerging via this regular interplay, the show’s storytelling remains limited. In fact, at midseason, the female half of the one non-romantic couple is unceremoniously dropped, allowing for an attempted shift away from the series’ confining high-concept organizing principle and, by proxy, its innate constructional issues. Unfortunately, this ultimately means that the show is just further able to devolve into what it’s always wanted to be: an ensemble hangout comedy about its leads’ romantic pursuits, with three couples constituting the regular cast. Only… they still don’t hang out that much. Okay, the last few episodes try to minimize that inherent design flaw by contriving excuses to unite, but in the process, there’s little reminder that they were fellow third graders. And frankly, that premise, though innately difficult, was the most interesting thing about the series — especially when all the strong characters prove to be nothing more than vessels for predictable and trite rom-com fare. So, with scripts set up to almost never play to the established situation in weekly story, The Class is doomed to fail.
Episode Count: 19 episodes produced and broadcast.
Episodes Seen: All 19.
Key Episode: #1: “Pilot” (09/18/06)
Why: The pilot is the strongest showing because the interesting premise does not yet reveal itself to be intrinsically impossible to satisfyingly explore in weekly story.
WORST WEEK (September 2008 – June 2009, CBS)
Premise: A man who always seems to find chaos struggles to be accepted by his fiancée’s family when they visit her parents for the week.
Cast: Kyle Bornheimer, Erinn Hayes, Nancy Lenehan, Kurtwood Smith
Writers: Matt Tarses, Gail Lerner, Gregg Mettler, Luvh Rakhe, Lon Zimmet & Dan Rubin, Sam Laybourne, Alison Brown, Neil Goldman & Garrett Donovan / Based on a series by Mark Bussell & Justin Sbresni
Thoughts: There had been several prior attempts to adapt the British sitcom The Worst Week Of My Life for American audiences, with variations like ABC’s Big Day (2006-2007) making it to air with a similar “disastrous lead up to a wedding” premise and an overarching time-focused construct. Now, I’ve written a potpourri entry for Big Day that will appear in an upcoming post, but what’s important to note here about that series is that it sets all 13 of its episodes on a single day. The original Worst Week Of My Life – per the British tradition – only had seven per season, each entry covering a single day of one week, with the first season culminating in a wedding and the second culminating in the birth of that couple’s child. CBS’ official American adaptation (a single-cam in its Monday multi-cam block), tweaks this high concept framework by breaking its season into mini-arcs, with the first five episodes covering one week (when a couple plans to tell her disapproving parents about their engagement and pregnancy) and the next five covering another (their wedding). This is a smart way to maintain the basic situation of the original series, whose value came both from this specific narrative “week” format, but also from the “everything that can go wrong will go wrong” maxim that justifies the seemingly microscopic focus and keeps the comic mania high. And while Big Day chooses to go all in, stuffing lots of chaos and thus story into an even tighter space (24 hours!), CBS’ Worst Week gives itself more breathing room… which therefore makes it more likely to sustain a longer run.
Unfortunately, this show’s British origins remain evident. Worst Week can’t help but be idea-driven, via a rigid construct where the groom-to-be is the maker of all the bedlam, and everyone else just fills positional roles based on that fact, with few details personalizing them beyond this basic premise. Specifically, his fiancée/wife has no personality whatsoever, and his in-laws are only there to be disapproving and humiliated because their daughter is committed to such an abject bumbler, for whom everything goes wrong. It’s funny… but it would be funny with anybody and with most writing. Meaning — it’s basic situation comedy, because it’s comedy based on a situation, but that situation, and the elements upholding it, are not specific or unique enough to make for anything truly great. What’s more, after the first ten produced episodes, the show seems to drop its eponymous “week” concept entirely, adopting an episodic routine that relies exclusively on this low-concept “clumsy son-in-law” dynamic. This move only emphasizes just how underdeveloped everything is without the benefit of the original time-based high concept, which had at least elevated the comic tension and justified an idea-driven focus. Accordingly, like The Class, Worst Week seems to abandon its difficult situation midway through, which only further dilutes its value, rendering this a disappointment. (Spoiler alert: I like Big Day better – it takes greater risks while also reinforcing its situation at all times.)
Episode Count: 16 episodes produced and broadcast (the last of which was burned off in June and chronologically should have aired fifth).
Episodes Seen: All 16.
Key Episode: #8: “The Cake” (11/17/08)
Why: This is a solid display of the basic low-concept and high-concept aspects of the premise, along with the show’s comic sensibilities, adding in another set of in-laws: his parents, played memorably by Connie Ray and Fred Willard.
ACCIDENTALLY ON PURPOSE (September 2009 – April 2010, CBS)
Premise: A newspaper critic in the wake of a breakup gets pregnant after a one-night stand with a younger man.
Cast: Jenna Elfman, Jon Foster, Ashley Jensen, Nicolas Wright, Grant Show, Lennon Parham
Writers: Claudia Lonow, Gregg Mettler, Vince Calandra, Cynthia Greenburg, Bill Kunstler, Alison McDonald, Mike Dieffenbach, Andrea Abbate, David Holden, Franklin Hardy & Shane Kosakowski, Jenn Lloyd & Kevin Bonani, David Rosenthal & DJ Nash / Based on the book by Mary F. Pols
Thoughts: With a rom-com premise and a fairly traditional MTM-ian work-plus-home construct about a leading lady who has a career in media and a unique personal life, Accidentally On Purpose looks like textbook sitcommery. It’s also got a likable and amusing star in Jenna Elfman — someone quirky but genuine enough to anchor a sitcom as its emotional access point. And she’s positioned between two very different men: her debonair but emotionally closed-off ex, and the young, puppy dog-like father of her pending child – the product of a one-night stand in a premise-establishing pilot that narratively has a lot to accomplish. Her push-pull between them — especially the junior daddy-to-be — is the initial tension of the series, both comedically and dramatically (until the ex is axed after the first 13). She’s also got two gal pals – a more “trad” married sister and a looser, quippier co-worker who further help frame her as moderate – while her baby daddy similarly has a roommate bestie who’s even more immature than he is, making him seem somewhat reasonable also, despite the basic fact that he’s still mismatched with the heroine. The problem? There’s nothing here we haven’t seen before – we’ve seen many ensemble rom-coms, even ones with pregnant leading ladies. And all the character archetypes, though distinct, are generic and impersonalized in actuality, not sparking many original story ideas – most of which are formulaic and related to either the pregnancy or the predictable romantic maneuvers that yearn for enlivening by more specifics. What’s more, the writing is generally pedestrian, and no one in the cast is as naturally gifted as Elfman (Nicolas Wright as the immature roommate is the only other helpful regular), rendering this just a mediocrity compared to other better and/or more interesting shows.
Episode Count: 18 episodes produced and broadcast.
Episodes Seen: All 18.
Key Episode: #3: “One Night Stand” (10/05/09)
Why: There is no good entry, but this one’s pure rom-com — an accurate display of the series.
Ultimately, I say study the two gaudily premised failures, The Class and Worst Week, but forget the textbook-yet-benign Accidentally On Purpose. And if you want more of my thoughts on other short-lived forgotten sitcoms, pick up my book — Great American Sitcoms of the 1950s!
Come back next week for another Wildcard! And stay tuned Tuesday for more Mother!