“M.Y.O.B.”: This new NBC series (8:30 p.m., WMAQ-Ch. 5) comes from Don Roos, the writer-director of “The Opposite of Sex,” and it tries very hard to have attitude.
A little too hard. Its central character is Riley Veatch, a hard-bitten teen orphan/runaway played with an expression of permanent skepticism by Katharine Towne. She comes to a Northern California high school where the principal is a woman she thinks is her aunt.
Riley sticks around, and it becomes, in the words of Riley’s ironically intended voiceover, “the whole fish out of water, odd couple, unrequited love, combo buddy [thing] you get most every night on every channel.”
The effort, to do an anti-TV show that comments on the medium and itself, is appreciated. Riley, who smokes and manipulates and uses sex as a weapon, is a fresh character in the teen tube world. Her still-young and seemingly resolutely single Aunt Opal (Lauren Graham) and the budding relationship between them is similarly intriguing. And Roos gets off some crackling good lines (“I don’t have a problem with gays; I watch Frasier all the time”).
But it comes on, in the early episodes, a little too strong, like a teen boy at a drive-in or the writer who uses two metaphors when one will do. Towne is unable to keep Riley’s tone from crossing over into too smug and sour. Opal’s life is painted as a little too pathetic. And Roos strains to make it all different.
But if this show could settle down a bit and find a less frantic voice — if NBC keeps it around long enough to let it — it could become something special.
