Jonathan Storm: 'Worst' is best
Sam Briggs isn't particularly excited that his future mother-in-law is making cherry pie. He's more of a cake man. Cake, pie, or perhaps a profiterole, Sam's show, Worst Week, which premieres Monday at 9:30 p.m. on CBS3, is a dandy confection, as slight and silly and flat-out hilarious as anything that's come along on TV in a few years.
Sam Briggs isn't particularly excited that his future mother-in-law is making cherry pie. He's more of a cake man.
Cake, pie, or perhaps a profiterole, Sam's show,
Worst Week
, which premieres Monday at 9:30 p.m. on CBS3, is a dandy confection, as slight and silly and flat-out hilarious as anything that's come along on TV in a few years.
The networks have been very chintzy about letting critics see their new shows this fall, but
Worst Week
is the best of those made available.
So many dramas get wrapped up in ever more layers of head-scratching complexity. Are the
Prison Breakers
breaking in or out this year? Are there villains hidden inside the
Heroes
? And let's not even start with
Lost
.
But
Worst Week
is simplicity itself. Sam gets so nervous in the presence of his fiancée's parents, Angela and Dick, that he turns into an ultra-klutz. That's it.
Tonight, Sam shows up at his soon-to-be in-laws' in a plastic-bag diaper, and hilarious antics ensue after he urinates on the beautiful goose Angela has prepared for Dick's birthday.
By then you would have angrily turned off 99 percent of TV sitcoms, but with this sweet farce, you're smiling broadly. By the time Angela's Valium bottle pops out of Sam's hand as he's driving to the drugstore, you're laughing uproariously, even before the obvious payoff arrives.
Kyle Bornheimer, best known before playing Sam as the guy at the colon controls in that Imodium ad - "Code Brown," he bellows - makes the train run. Look up
affable
in the dictionary, and there's his picture. Your heart goes out to his eternally optimistic Sam.
Erinn Hayes (who played Pam Dawber in NBC's
Mork and Mindy
biopic three years ago) is his sunny lover, Melanie, whose looks vary in the show because the producers added some new scenes months after the pilot was shot. Nancy Lenehan gets to be Melanie's mom. Lenehan has guested as the neighbor lady on a million series. (She was the bookish Pat who transformed into a horrendous demon in a
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
episode)
And Kurtwood Smith, already in the hall of fame for curmudgeonly TV dads for his work in
That '70s Show
, is now a judge named Dick. Don't worry, the wordplay on his name, obvious and jejune on most other sitcoms, is funny here, too.
In fact,
Worst Week
stands as a stinging indictment of all the lazy, unoriginal writers, directors and actors who for years have tried to foist off as funny scads of sitcoms that are basically just streams of tired sex and scatology jokes.
Unencumbered by a smile-smothering laugh track,
Worst Week
trips along instead, with a lilting little jazz combo adding lightness. It's pleasantly unsettling to find yourself adding the raucous laughter.
Angela and especially Dick are going to be shocked and unamused when they learn that Melanie's "friend" - that's what they insist on calling Sam, though the couple has been living together for ages - has made their darling daughter pregnant. But their love for her will guide them at least to begrudging neutrality toward their future son-in-law.
Love and good intentions abound in
Worst Week,
which is based on a successful British TV comedy.
Some observers wonder whether the creators can keep up the shenanigans. But I can't wait to see the wedding.
Jonathan Storm:
Television Review
Worst Week
9:30 p.m. Mondays on CBS3