Courting Monkeys
When my wife and I settled down to watch the first episode of Courting Alex she said the same thing she’d said a few days earlier when we settled down to watch the first episode of Love Monkey. “Ugh, this is CBS,” she said.
Surely, I thought, there must be some show on CBS we watch. Lost is ABC. The various Law & Orders are NBC, of course. Lazytown is Nick Jr. Oh, and there’s Disparate Housewives and now, alas, Celebrity Fit Club 3 — none of which are CBS. I’ve been catching up on Firefly on the DVD Boxed Set Channel. And I did watch the first episode of Criminal Minds — didn’t I write about it for TeeVee? Maybe I forgot — hey, that’s a CBS show! Which I never watched again!
I guess my wife is right as always. We don’t watch CBS. I don’t think we’ve tuned in to CBS with any regularity since Chicago Hope went off the air. This used to be because CBS was the network of the elderly and the incontinent. Now I’m not so sure — maybe today it’s the network of the young and hip and we’ve been left behind. After all, we now find the New Yorker endlessly interesting. We’re getting very old.
If the two shows we saw were any indication, though, CBS is not the network of the young and hip. It’s the network of the middle-aged and not terribly interesting.
Love Monkey stars Tom Cavanagh, late of NBC’s Ed. Of course we loved Ed and therefore love Tom, so we were set to love his new series. It’s an amazing coincidence, but the idea behind Love Monkey is very similar to Ed: A big-time well-paid business guy played by Tom Cavanagh watches his current relationship end while he loses his job. He drops down to a more homey position in life and finds support from a small ensemble cast of wacky characters. And the show is shot in the New York City metropolitan area.
The big difference is in Ed, Ed was named Ed, and in Love Monkey, Ed is named Tom. And in the new show, Ed — er, Tom — Tom stays in New York instead of moving back to the heartland (actually suburban New Jersey).
The other big difference is Ed was created by Rob Burnett and Love Monkey wasn’t created so much as aped. Apparently the show is based on a book or something but, as produced by Tom Cavanagh and Michael Rauch, it ends up wishing it were Ed.
I wish it was Ed too. Ed had many flaws, and wasn’t always great, but from the beginning it was a fun way to spend an hour or so. Not so Love Monkey. The new show is definitely earnest, and it wants to be good, but it doesn’t quite make it. The humor isn’t there. The interesting characters aren’t there. The ensemble cast is a bit big and unwieldy — does Tom need three guy buddies? I understand they’re supposed to cover different male characterizations to give us the full range of maleness: Married chubby guy Jason Priestly, hunky jock Christopher Wiehl, upwardly mobile black guy Larenz Tate. All three of them crowd into every scene when only one of them would do. And are any of them especially interesting? Well, Jason Priestly steals every shot he’s in because you’re looking at him and thinking what the hell happened to Dylan? Or Brandon? Which one was he? Whatever happened to Shannen Doherty? Wasn’t she excellent in that Kevin Smith movie? Oh, crap, Love Monkey’s still on.
Every so often the show is interrupted for some music, because Tom is supposed to be an a&r guy for a record company. In the first episode he’s competing with Josh Stamberg’s character Eli, a prick, to sign a young singer/songwriter named Wayne played by Teddy Geiger; which recording artist, in a curious synergy, is already signed to Columbia Records, which used to be a CBS company, and it all gets complicated. All fine if Teddy/Wayne were really good, which he isn’t. That is, if he were a friend of mine, I’d be blown away, but in a world which already contains John Mayer and Howie Day, he’s redundant, not to mention pre-packaged, which is the very opposite of what Love Monkey is trying to say when Tom is fired from his big record company job and goes to work for the small but principled indie label.
So every little while what passes for humor in Love Monkey is put on hold while we listen to another in a long line of TV soundtrack promotion moments straight out of Dawson’s Creek or Felicity. Meanwhile I’m thinking, no, Dylan was the other guy. What’s he been doing lately? I better look him up on the IMDb.
At some point Love Monkey ends and we can find something more interesting to do, like pick lint out of the carpet. And when we’re done picking lint, a few days later, we can tune in to Courting Alex.
Courting Alex is another pun-titled sitcom in a long line of same, but this one stars Jenna Elfman, late of ABC’s Dharma & Greg. Deride Dharma & Greg if you like, but to me it was one of the few perfect sitcoms. A perfect sitcom may not be as good as an imperfect drama or even dramedy, but still, it has its place. Maybe shows are better when they’re shot with one camera without a laugh track. But there’s still room, even at this late date, for a well-done sitcom in the standard mold, and Dharma & Greg fit that description. 24 minutes of amusement in a well-defined structure, the sitcom is the video version of a sonnet or a haiku. And Dharma & Greg was John Donne.
That may be hyperbole but it’s not hyperbole to say that Courting Alex is not proud — or something to be proud of. At least its premise isn’t as contrived as its title: Jenna Elfman plays Alex Rose, a high-powered attorney in the firm headed by her father Bill, played by Dabney Coleman. In the first episode, during a real estate deal, Alex meets Scott Larson, played by Josh Randall of Ed fame, and they’re attracted to each other. But’s she’s a workaholic and he’s a fun-loving guy of spontaneous action. Meanwhile, Alex’s father keeps pushing her into the arms of Stephen, another prick played by Josh Stamberg.
You’re probably thinking: Is the pool of acting talent so tiny that these two shows really had to share, not just two castaways from Ed, but also the same actor as their main prick? And who dusted off Dabney Coleman for this?
I, for one, would be thrilled to see Dabney’s return to prime time, if he weren’t totally wasted in this part. He’s given nothing to do and further seems to be playing a nice guy — and who wants to see Dabney Coleman play a nice guy? Might as well hire Jack Nicholson to play Helen Keller.
In fact everyone is wasted in this show. Nothing very interesting happens, nothing’s very funny. It’s all sort of there. Jenna Elfman is as beautiful as she’s ever been — and I do love Jenna Elfman — but her essential goofiness is submerged in her attempt to play against type as a repressed, uptight lawyer. Josh Randall seems like a likeable guy but he couldn’t act his way into a paper bag, much less back out again, and so he’s just there playing Dr. Burton from Ed. And Dr. Burton was great as a supporting character, but as a lead, he’s just not enough. The only other actor to make any kind of impression is Hugh Bonneville in the Bentley role, dropping in to visit Alex and advance… well, I was going to say plot, and then I thought characterization, and then I realized nothing works to finish this sentence, because anything would imply that the show’s writers had Hugh Bonneville there for any purpose beyond his being required by sitcom convention. So Hugh Bonneville drops in to visit Alex because that’s what neighbors do in sitcoms. In theory this leads to more jokes but in this case it’s just pro forma; Bonneville adds nothing to the show.
The best part about Courting Alex is, since it’s a standard sitcom, it’s over in half the time it took Love Monkey to get to the same place, so we can get back to picking lint that much faster.
With these two new shows on offer, CBS is set to remake itself into the network we still have no desire to tune in to. Looking at the list of possibilities on their Website, I can honestly say I have zero interest in ever seeing any one of the series CBS is currently airing. So my wife was correct: “Ugh, this is CBS.”
[Footnote: For full disclosure, I should note that Scott Larson is my very absolutely best friend, and he does not ride a motorcycle. Also, he lives in Philadelphia, and almost never dates Jenna Elfman.]