It’s no laughing matter when a new comedy crashes and burns. Not for the networks, who blow up millions of dollars developing shows in the quest for ratings, nor for the stars who signed on hoping for fame and fat residuals.
Why do some shows spin laughs as sweet as cotton candy while others stink and drool like an old basset hound?
Comedy legend Jerry Lewis perhaps put it best when he offered up his theory of what makes people laugh: “Funny had better be sad somewhere.”
When "sad" tumbles down the cliff onto the rocks of "pathetic", we wind up in the realm of two new comedies – Weird Loners and Bad Judge – that premiere back-to-back tomorrow on OSN.
Make no mistake, these rookies – both already cancelled in the United States during their first seasons – are the walking dead of television land, drawing their last gasp of airtime here as the American networks make a post-mortem final grasp for revenue with overseas sales.
Need we fear and run screaming in horror from these zombies? Heck no! Let’s pull up a chair, pop some corn, mock them mightily and wallow in their wit deficit as we probe how this pair – and others – jumped the rails to join the pantheon of train-wreck TV.
First up is Weird Loners, which revolves around the inanity that ensues when serial womaniser and jerk extraordinaire Stosh (Zachary Knighton, formerly of Happy Endings) is forced to move into a Queens townhouse with his man-child cousin Eric (Nate Torrence) after losing his job and condo for messing around with his boss's fiancée.
Unrepentant, Stosh hits on their next-door neighbour, a high-strung dental hygienist, Caryn (Becki Newton, whom you might recognise from Ugly Betty and How I Met Your Mother), which prompts her to call off her engagement and to seek a new roommate.
Enter airy-fairy, angst-ridden artist Zara (Meera Rohit Kumbhani), who completes a foursome who subsequently try to bond in bizarre ways.
There was no bonding with the viewers, however – their eyeballs slid off the telly screen as if it were a Teflon pan. This humdrum Fox comedy failed to crack even the paltry two-million mark in viewers. When you contrast this with Modern Family's 12 million viewers, you get the picture – Weird Loners simply failed to connect.
In a word, its problem was empathy. We feel not a jot of it for these annoying harpies, who fritter away all their time acting so strange – Eric dresses up as a dorky chess knight, while Zara gets her freak on over a darts tournament – that we never get to experience their inner pain or identify with them. Should we root for their happiness? Nope.
“Zara is into the universe, energy and love – totally Zen all the time,” says Kumbhani. “But she just doesn’t necessarily love all the people in the universe. She doesn’t really give a crap.”
And that’s why, Zara darling, neither do we.
Prior to the show’s March 31 premiere in North America, a delusionally confident Torrence uttered prophetic words: “It feels like the network is attached to it and wants to give it a nice little send-off.”
Weird Loners got that send-off – to eternity – when Fox cancelled the show on May 11 after only six episodes.
Bad Judge is another story altogether. With proven star Kate Walsh (Grey's Anatomy, Private Practice) in the lead role of Judge Rebecca Wright, and with a full 13-episode order, success looked like a slam dunk.
Its failure to launch is all the more baffling given that its executive producers included comedy megastar Will Ferrell and his writing partner Adam McKay (Anchorman, Talladega Nights). And yet the show's demise, ultimately, was a no-brainer.
As any entertainment-industry insider will tell you, a “willing suspension of disbelief” – the audience’s desire to play along with the fantasy and allow it to feel real in their gut – is critical to a show’s success.
The bottom line? Bad Judge's premise proved too outlandish to believe: Judge Rebecca Wright parties hard and rocks out as a drummer in a band by night, while presiding over a court in Los Angeles as one of its toughest judges.
“I would say you’d want to watch this girl because you’ve never seen anybody like her on television before,” said Walsh. “She’s 40 in the courtroom and 20 on the outside.”
And a big fat zero on the tube – viewers simply refused to buy into the idea that such a judge could exist, even in a TV-comedy universe – even the dragons on Game of Thrones have more street cred.
“With comedy, you’re only going to be right about 70 per cent of the time,” says McKay.
Bad Judge clearly fell into the remainder. It premiered in October last year on NBC – and scored a big Halloween boo-hoo when it was cancelled on the 31st.
“The TV business is uglier than most things,” the late writer Hunter S Thompson famously opined. Serious dramas, too, can die like dogs, for no obvious good reason.
Take, for example, Forever, a crime fantasy starring Welsh actor Ioan Gruffudd (Fantastic Four) as Dr Henry Morgan, an immortal New York City medical examiner born in 1779, who studies the dead for criminal cases while trying to figure out the mystery of his own miraculous life.
Immortality can be a great tease and a high-concept attention-getter – but it has been done to death, so to speak. In the end, this show failed to offer any answers for viewers as to why Henry was immortal, frustrating them to no end. Clearly, failing to meet audience expectations is a no-no.
Even worse, familiarity breeds contempt. Forever echoed the themes of New Amsterdam, a short-lived 2008 Fox drama about a 400-year-old NYPD detective, which was itself cancelled after just eight episodes. Forever at least managed a full season of 22 episodes but expired without a whimper on May 7, when ABC pulled the plug.
Another reason dramas drop into the abyss is that they fail to live up to the thrills of the source material that inspired them. This was not the case, however, with Constantine, the occult anti-hero ripped from the pages of the popular DC Comics graphic novels. He was previously featured in an eye-popping 2005 movie starring Keanu Reeves as the titular demon hunter, responsible for defending humanity from the gathering forces of darkness.
In the NBC TV version, another Welsh actor with Shakespearean roots, Matt Ryan, stepped up to fill Reeves's shoes and did so admirably, in a show that was much more faithful to the comic book – until the network decided it could not afford such an expensive show, with all its special effects, in a humble time slot. Constantine was thrown into the fiery pit after only 13 episodes on May 8.
In this case, though, the “train wreck” was purely financial, derailed by the grim penny-pinching of a gutless network.
• Weird Loners (9pm) and Bad Judge (9.30pm) begin Monday, August 3, on OSN First Comedy HD. No UAE air dates are available for Forever and Constantine
artslife@thenational.ae
