I generally dismiss shows about show business as a tired trope from unimaginative writers, but occasionally something pops through that’s worth fighting against that bias. Created by Steve Levitan (Just Shoot Me, and more recently Modern Family), this show contains some of the more wholesome relics of old-school sitcoms while still maintaining a sharp subversiveness.
The doozy of a plot is as follows: Three has-been actors (Johnny Knoxville, Judy Greer, and Worthy) and one classically-trained has-been in denial (Keegan Michael-Key) are recruited to revive a multi-camera (AKA old-school, laugh-track) sitcom in a comedic landscape of more advanced comedy. This wouldn’t be unusual as tons of 90s schlock is being rebooted, but in this case it’s a little of an in-universe head scratcher as the proposed TV executive, Hannah (Rachel Bloom from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), has pretentious high-art tastes. Secretly, however, Hannah is doing the show because her estranged dad, Gordon (Paul Riser), is the creator and she wants to ruin his legacy. Her daddy issues reemerge when Gordon appears back on set and has decided not to surrender the intellectual property so these two knuckleheads have to now work together.
They also have competing writing rooms: Old Borscht Belt comedians verses the kinds of LGBT and POC headliners who often populate hotlists merely because they are gay or a person of color (this is demonstrated by two women of color pitching a joke about two women discussing the Bechtel test but having nothing funny in the punch line). The show is an equal opportunity skewer (or is the word skewerer?) and the comedic tension of these eight secondary characters has the potential to give me about as much hope for intergenerational friendship as this polarized age can provide.
Like Levitan’s previous hit, Just Shoot Me, this is a sharp comedy with very shallow back-stabbing characters with the emotional heft of a (forgive me for using such a gooey word) beautiful father-daughter relationship.
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