daniel cohen looks at the new CBS sitcom …
Plot: When the daughter (Beth Behrs) of a billionaire goes broke, she’s hired as a waitress and works with the sharp toothed Max (Kat Dennings) as the two opposites begin to form a friendship.
Alright, the first 10 minutes were horrible … but then it got better. The first act is a volcanic eruption of terrible dialogue, stereotypes galore, and lazy sex gags. The side characters are weak as hell, but at the end of the day, the show is called 2 Broke Girls, and the actresses who play the ‘girls’ have great chemistry and are genuinely funny.
It’s the classic odd couple scenario. Dennings is the sarcastic, more unkempt Max, while Behrs plays Caroline, the prim and proper ‘just lost all her money’ type. Both characters are walking clichés. One of the first scenes with Caroline involves her complaining about the yellow waitress uniform and how the Chanel she’s currently wearing goes better with her skin tone. Now, I was ready to turn off the TV right there, but as the episode goes on, the cliches evaporate and the jokes start to stem from good dialogue and great comedic performances. Dennings especially shines like crazy. It’s not like her dialogue is the funniest stuff ever written, but kind of like her performance in Thor, it’s impossible not to laugh and like her. Dennings and Behrs will be able to carry this show, at least for a little while.
But the other characters are absolutely horrendous. The worst is Earl (Garrett Morris), the elderly friendly co-worker who speaks about three times, and they are all the worst kind of sitcom writing. For example, his remark on the Russian waitress who gets fired for having sex in the back room he exclaims was ‘Vladimir Putin it out.’ Yikes. We also have Han Lee (Matthew Moy), the stereotypical Asian manager. There’s also Oleg (Jonathan Kite), the horny cook who just stares at Max’s breasts. The one secondary character who managed to make me laugh though was Peach (Brooke Lyons), a wealthy new mom who Max babysits for. After she frets about her twin babies having to go through another diaper change when the morning nanny just changed them, she shouts, ‘Motherhood is for reals.’ Okay … that got me laughing pretty hard. The actress had very good delivery.
Despite all its generic sitcom shortcomings, the two leads ultimately left a good taste in my mouth. I’d be more than happy to follow them for a couple more episodes, but I don’t think their chemistry can keep me watching for a whole season. I’ll tire of these characters fairly quickly. The show desperately needs a secondary character to step it up, and the pilot gave me no reason to believe one will.
Also, just as a side note, the Caroline character claims she got a 2300 on her SATs. Huh?! I dropped my cup of Gatorade when I heard that. You can get that high on the SATs now? How the hell does that work?
Rating: 6.5 out of 10 (Slightly Better Than ‘Meh’)
all photos credit: CBS
America has an out-of-touch upper class who don’t know they’re out of touch, who even when they slip into designer-name-certified, reproduction-urban-chic clothes fail to blend in with the gritty crowd. As with Mitt Romney, it’s the little things that give them away…and creep the rest of us out. They’re “Cashmartians” — strange aliens made of money attempting to take human form.
2 Broke Girls is a delicious dig into the conceits of our clueless cashmartians told from the viewpoint of characters who sweat for three-dollar tips and aspire to the financial, societal and familial security too many of us take for granted.
That being said, if you like the show and hate Garrett Morris, you’re probably still waiting your turn at one of Max’s tables to have your too-rich-to-get-it foibles raked over by her acid wit. Honesty, how far does a hair-studio-styled coif have to stray into the colonic-polyp forest before you cannot *get* Garrett Morris? The man is a national treasure!