'Worst Week' too close to its mother?
WORST WEEK. 9:30 tonight, Channel 3. Some things deserve to get lost in translation when a show is remade for American TV, but CBS' "Worst Week" is holding on to most of them for dear life.
WORST WEEK. 9:30 tonight, Channel 3.
Some things deserve to get lost in translation when a show is remade for American TV, but CBS' "Worst Week" is holding on to most of them for dear life.
Adapted from a British show, "Worst Week of My Life," which applied Murphy's Law to the week before one man's wedding, with "Meet the Parents"-like results, tonight's "Worst Week" premiere keeps not only the everything-that-can-go-wrong-will theme, but most of the details from a much-later episode of the original, right down to a disaster involving a veddy British goose that could just as easily have been a turkey.
Even the title, which made some sense in the original show, whose first two seasons had seven episodes apiece, is a head-scratcher: Sam Briggs (Kyle Bornheimer) is having, at most, what appears to be a very bad weekend, as he tries to ingratiate himself with the parents (Nancy Lenehan and Kurtwood Smith) of the woman he plans to marry (Erinn Hayes).
There's some undeniably funny stuff happening, most of it surrounding Smith, who's dead-on - in more ways than one - as Sam's future father-in-law, but it's easy to imagine, if the mayhem continues week after week, sympathy for Sam being replaced by exasperation.
British comedies tend to be built for speed, ours for durability, the goal here being 100-plus episodes and a syndication deal.
If CBS wants "Worst Week" to go the distance, it might have to snip the cord tying it to the mother country.
What the readers said
Daily News Reader Reviewers considered "Worst Week" far from the worst of the shows I screened for them last week, awarding it an average score of 8 on a scale of 1 to 10.
"Very funny, with jokes going places I did not see coming," wrote Anthony Tann Jr., of West Philadelphia. Karen Lawler, of Havertown, called it "very entertaining," while her daughter, Sandy - yes, we had our first mother-daughter critic team - was a tougher sell, noting that she's "not sure how they can use this idea of bad things happening again and again." *
- Ellen Gray