Welcome to a busy Monday newsletter! It's a comedy heavy week this week. I am looking at Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage, Happy's Place, Season 2 of Shrinking and the pairing of Matlock and Elsbeth. Plus thoughts on English Teacher, The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh, Agatha All Along, Abbott Elementary and Frasier!
Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage is the third series in the Big Bang universe. I never watched The Big Bang Theory but when it went from a raucous multi-cam sitcom to the single camera family sitcom, Young Sheldon, I was on board and watched the entire seven season run. I never loved the show but I liked it quite a bit at times. Now the show is shifting back to a multi-cam format with Montana Jordan and Emily Osment taking their Young Sheldon characters to their own show. Big Bang didn't share any actors so the format switch seemed fine but this is jarring because its characters we've seen in a single cam format thrown into a multi-cam world.
Once you get past that though, it's a fairly by-the-books multi-cam sitcom. It isn't bad by any means but it's been quite awhile since a multi-cam sitcom really had sharp writing and great timing. We are so far past the days of the original Frasier (used in a meta-reference at the beginning of this pilot), Friends, Cheers and all the way back to Taxi, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and even I Love Lucy. Nowadays, multi-cam sitcoms are one of the lowest common denominators. So what I'll say for Georgie & Mandy is it clears that bar thanks to winning performances from Montana Jordan and Emily Osment and people behind the scenes who seem intent on it not being too punchline driven but also having the same humor and heart mix we found on Young Sheldon. This isn't a show I'm going to have a ton to say about, it sort of is what it is. But that's not an entirely bad thing.
This is the stretch of multi-cam sitcom premieres with Georgie & Mandy and Happy's Place both debuting last week and Poppa's House arriving tonight. Happy's Place marks the return of Reba McEntire to the sitcom world after her much-loved WB sitcom Reba in the early 2000s. I was expecting to not like Happy's Place at all and I certainly wouldn't say I loved it, but it did slightly exceed my expectations. Yes, it feels like a TV Land sitcom from the early 2010s and yes it is broad and filled with so-so jokes. It does even less than Georgie & Mandy does to making multi-cam sitcoms a respectable art form.
But Reba McEntire is such a likable presence and she goes a long way to making this show work as well as it does. Her Reba co-star Melissa Peterman is back in this show and you can tell that she and Reba have worked together. Comedy is so much about timing and you can tell that the two of them have honed that timing where the rest of the cast is playing catch-up. That being said, Belissa Escobedo had some nice moments too in the first episode. The men in the cast are much weaker. I didn't love this show by any means and there's a good chance I won't stick with it but the first episode showed me enough to give it at least another episode.
It feels like it's been a long time since Shrinking has been on TV. Last seen in March 2023, the series returned for a second season and I was realizing that I remembered almost nothing about it aside from liking Harrison Ford's performance. The recap helped me a lot because things did start to come back to me quickly and I remember thinking it was a show with potential but one that hadn't quite gelled yet. If the first two episodes of the second season are any indication, it appears that the show has found its groove.
The show seems much more self-assured this go round. Although the show still centers around Jason Segel, it's clear that there will be a lot more for the supporting characters this season. They all seemed much better defined and some are spinning into their own stories. Ted Lasso's Brett Goldstein (also a co-creator on this show) has joined the cast in a recurring role and I'm excited to see where things go with that character. I want to especially give a shoutout to Lukita Maxwell as Segel's on-screen daughter. I think she made the biggest improvement year to year. And Harrison Ford remains really incredible in this. He was completely robbed of an Emmy nomination last year. Let's hope that corrects itself this year.
I don't know if I'm just getting older but the 1-2 punch of Matlock and Elsbeth is absolutely my favorite programming block (along with Ghosts and perhaps Georgie & Mandy before them). Now granted I don't watch them live and may not always even watch them back to back, but I do think the two dramas are about the most compatible shows that aren't set in the same universe (like the Chicago or FBI shows). They both have captivating performances at the center, they are both fairly lighthearted as far as procedural dramas go (Matlock is a bit more weighty than Elsbeth but both are still on the light side as far as tone goes).
This week had the second episode (and timeslot premiere) of Matlock and the second season premiere of Elsbeth. I thought the second episode of Matlock mostly continued the momentum from the premiere though I can already tell the show may rise and fall a bit on the case of the week like most procedurals do. I didn't think the case was particularly compelling but Kathy Bates continues to be strong and the mythology of the show continued to be interesting and provide just enough of an extra push. It's Elsbeth that I really love though. What Elsbeth has that Matlock doesn't is the "villain of the week." They crushed it in the first season with memorable performances from people like Retta, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Jane Krakowski, Keegan-Michael Key, Elizabeth Lail and more. That continued in the kickoff to the second season with a great guest turn from Nathan Lane. The show follows the same basic formula every week but each guest star, and the emphasis on their performance, make each one feel fresh.
SCRIPTED PREMIERES THIS WEEK
After a very busy month, things are settling down with a lot of fall premieres in the rearview mirror. CBS's premieres end tonight with the seventh season premiere of The Neighborhood followed by the series premiere of Poppa's House, starring Damon Wayans and Damon Wayans Jr. Also premiering tonight with three episodes is the sixth and final season of What We Do in the Shadows, a show I'll be sad to see come to an end. Thursday has the premiere of Tyler Perry's first Netflix series with Beauty in Black as well as the fifth season premiere of Star Trek: Lower Decks on Paramount+. Friday has the series premiere of the Apple TV+ limited series Before starring Billy Crystal, Judith Light and Rosie Perez. Finally on Sunday, Paramount+ has the second season premiere of Lioness, a Taylor Sheridan show that hasn't seemed to break through. Also premiering on Sunday is the third and final season premiere of HBO's Somebody Somewhere. While it hasn't broken through to being a big hit or awards player, it certainly has its fans.
ODDS & ENDS
- English Teacher wrapped up its first season and it ended as it started: as one of the most self-assured first years of a comedy I've seen in recent years, perhaps ever. It's not like every episode was a banger or every character worked all the time. But the amount that did work is really impressive and the batting average was awfully high. It was a show that knew its characters, knew the dynamic between them, knew what was funny. My biggest complaint was that it was only eight episodes. This is a show that should have been 13 at least like the old days of cable comedies. I'm anticipating a second season with the positive reception this show got and hopefully it'll expand the episode count. I'd also like to see it spend just a little bit more time in the classroom because that was the source of the funniest moments of the season.
- I didn't have time to check out both Hysteria! and The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh this week so I had to pick between the two. After seeing the runtimes and reading a few reviews for Hysteria!, I went with Pradeeps. I watched three episodes and I thought there were things to like but I'm probably not going to watch anymore. It had some interesting elements but ultimately didn't come together enough for me to make me interested in watching the rest of the season. I think the framing of the interrogation of the titular family is way too prominent in the series and grinds any momentum the show gets to a halt by constantly flashing forward to those scenes.
- I'm out on Agatha All Along. It just was all a little too fantasy-driven and Marvel-y for me. I thought the performances and production value were fun but the only thing that I enjoyed about WandaVision was the sitcom parodies. This eventually started to journey a little too far down the mythology road (as it traveled down the witches road) and it lost me.
- Abbott Elementary had a great episode this week. I think the show got back to basics with an episode that brought all the teachers together and highlighted the eccentricities of each character. The reaction to the potential spread of ringworm at the elementary school was a smart and tight concept and shows me that the show hasn't lost its fastball even if said fastball was missing for large swaths last season.
- I haven't written much about the second season of the revival of Frasier because it continues to be plagued by the same things the first season was. This week was a very farcical episode set in Cape Cod. It was the type of episode the original cast would have thrived on but the new cast is just not up to snuff. Kelsey Grammer can do it but he has almost no help around him (fellow OG cast member Peri Gilpin provides a bit). I have a feeling this revival will be two and done. It just doesn't seem to be clicking either creatively or with viewers.
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