I’m surprised at the number of comments my mention of The Good Place generated. Thanks to @Darren_Garrison, @Shoeless, @Raza, @Wheelz, and @Elmer_J.Fudd for the recommendations to continue with it. I plan to at least finish Season 1 (currently just finished Episode 4) and then decide whether to stay with it or move on. It takes a while to get into the spirit of a series, especially an unusual one like this. I enjoy the witty humour but it’s more the kind of stuff that makes you smile rather than laugh-out-loud funny.
Having watched a lot of Cheers in years past, I find the presence of Ted Danson in this series a little incongruous. I keep expecting to see Diane, Frasier, Carla, Norm, and Cliff Clavin!
And better still after the second. The first season was quite experimental and had only five episodes. The second had a dozen, which was still half a normal season. One can trace the evolution of the series from the early neurotic self-obsessions of Seinfeld and David to its gradual emergence as mainstream comedy starting around Season 3.
OK, on The Good Place, by around Episode 6 I was thoroughly hooked. Currently on Episode 8 (“Most Improved Player”) and I’ll even take back my comment that there’s no laugh-out-loud humour – that’s the episode where Michael asks Eleanor a series of questions to determine if she’s genuinely a good or bad person – the questionnaire is absolutely hilarious! That’s also the one where the omniscient robot assistant Janet gets her memory rebooted and her knowledge is temporarily a little shaky – no matter what Michael, sitting in his office, asks her for, she always brings him a potted cactus! And you gotta love Chidi constantly being met with “no one likes a philosophy professor!”.
Thanks, guys! When this is done I’m definitely moving on to Season 2.
4 seasons, 13 episodes each, except 14 episodes in Season 4. They ran 22 minutes on NBC, but on streaming and Blu-ray they run around 25-28.
Since this particular scene is already semi-spoilered for those who haven’t seen it, I may as well mention that there’s a later scene in which Michael asks Tahani to come into his office because he needs to interview her, too. By this point his desk is almost entirely cluttered with potted cacti!
ABC ran the first 6 episodes of Shifting Gears with Tim Allen and Kat Dennings on Sunday night.
I find Kat hard to watch in the early episodes. I can see her very obviously walking to her mark and striking a pose. There’s one scene where she delivers a heated line and marches off camera. I can usually ignore poor acting but this was so painfully obvious. Kat gets better in the later episodes.
Part of the problem is the writing. The lines don’t flow or sound natural. Tim says something angrily and Kat retorts. That’s a summary of ep 1.
The stories are grabbing the lowest hanging fruit. 2nd episode there’s a conflict over the older boy’s special ed classification at school. 3rd episode Kat needs a job and of couse working at Tim’s shop causes conflict, 4th episode is better and addresses the characters grief from Tim’s wife (Kat’s mother’s) death.
5th episode Kat’s estranged husband is back and Tim gives the older boy a beat up vintage car. Heck Kat just dumped the husband and moved back home a few weeks earlier in ep 1. I hope he doesn’t come back permanently. The cast is too crowded already.
6th episode grieving widower Tim is attracted to a widow. That’s so original.
I’ll finish out season 1. There are signs that this show could get much better. The writers are still struggling to get any genuine connection between Tim and the supporting cast. The writing definitely needs improvement.
While someone has already pointed out that there’s 4 seasons, but this statement here made me realise that I think I missed the 4th Season anyway, and I thought we only had 3 seasons. So, thanks for the mistake
I watched a couple of episodes of that. Kat’s character is supposed to have a brother and initially I thought that’s who Seann William Scott was portraying but apparently not. No, it’s not a very funny show.
My wife and I have been watching, only because a new Shifting Gears shows up on Hulu Thursday nights along with a new Abbott Elementary. When AE is over, SG starts automatically. It’s a default-watch. A “too lazy to pick up the remote and change it” watch.
It’s bad, but it’s bad in exactly the way I’d expect a Tim Allen vehicle to be. I find Kat Dennings generally annoying-- she basically plays the same saucy, wisecracking character she did on 'Two Broke Girls", only now with a couple kids in tow.
I’m much more disappointed in 'Going Dutch" because I had more hope for it-- I wanted to believe that since it had Danny Pudi attached to it, that maybe it would have at least a hint of “Community” level comedy cred. No such luck. The first episode seemed promising, but subsequent eps have been pretty lame.
Where are all the good new sitcoms? The only newish sitcom that seems to be any good that I’ve seen lately is “George and Mandy’s First Marriage”, a spinoff of 'Young Sheldon" with Georgie, the ‘dumb’ brother. At first I thought it was going to be awful-- they made it a standard 3-camera, laugh-track heavy show, and the difference in tone from YS was jarring at first (they made a decent meta-joke out of that, when George and Mandy’s family are watching ‘Fraser’ and George says “I like that they have a laugh track so I know when to laugh”). I mean, it’s not laugh out loud funny, and it’s probably benefiting from my initial low expectations, but the humor is character-based and the characters mostly aren’t annoying stereotypes-- for example, though George is supposed to be ‘dumb’, he’s not cartoonishly dumb, like a Joey Tribbiani; he’s depicted as showing common sense and having people skills. He’s a born salesman.
We’ve seen episodes 1 and 3 (for some reason, episode 2 recording was lost).
Agree with your take; also, the first thing that jumped out at me was the laugh track. I can’t remember the last time I watched a show with a laugh track.
Well, I’m pretty sure that Resident Alien has jumped the shark for me. S3 is just too over the top. I’m not so sure about Severance, either, but will probably stick with it to see where it goes for now. Started up Silo again; have to see where it goes, also.
