The very label sitcom promises comedy. But the doldrums facing the genre these days stem from the networks’ increasing failure to deliver a key ingredient: jokes.
Take two new entries premiering Monday: “Listen Up” (7:30 p.m., WBBM-Ch. 2) and “Second Time Around” (8:30 p.m., WPWR-Ch. 50). They are almost incredible in their lack of laughs. Oh, there’s a mild chuckle here and there, but never any real zingers or howls, nothing to invite a viewer to return week after week or even endure an entire first episode.
“Listen Up” is distinguished only as another, undoubtedly doomed effort to launch Jason Alexander in a successful, post-“Seinfeld” show. Here, his role as a sports columnist/commentator in print and on TV, mingled with his put-upon persona as father of two teens, is boring and dull-normal, unlike his amusing antics on “Seinfeld.” He commits that deadly sitcomic sin: blandness.
When wife Dana (Wendy Makkena) mentions she’s hosting a rich donor as part of her volunteer effort to finance a zoo habitat, Alexander, as Tony, queries, “Isn’t habitat zoospeak for a new fence?”
Later, as part of an ongoing battle with teen daughter Megan (Daniella Monet), who’s terminally embarrassed by everything he does, says or wears, he sneaks onto her soccer practice field to spy with binoculars from afar, prompting her friends to mistake him for a pervert. “That’s no lunatic,” she exclaims. “That’s my dad.”
Even worse than the comatose domestic humor is the half-baked attempt at workplace wit, with Tony one-half of a sparring TV commentary team completed by another sitcom veteran, Malcolm-Jamal Warner. The climax here comes, during a discourse mocking soccer, when Alexander hops up and sings mock lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” culminating with the lyrics, “We know soccer blows.”
Don’t “Listen Up.” Tune out.
“Second Time Around,” at least, is somewhat novel as a new sitcom primarily peopled by African-American characters, one of the few new offerings to acknowledge diversity. Its title, about a divorced couple remarrying and trying one more time, is the same as a now forgotten 1961 Debbie Reynolds movie, and, sadly, that coincidence actually telegraphs a lot about the lack of hipness and shopworn humor in this first entry.
Nicole Parker and Boris Kodjoe (married in real life, by the way) have just remarried and face a few leftover ills from their estrangement. A painter, she posed nude for a male artist, while he began to date her again while secretly engaged to another woman.
But the Muses, as the couple is fictionally named, are attractive, well-to-do upper-class sophisticates. (He’s an architect).
There’s no edge and thus very little comedy, only retread sparring between the sexes and marital cliches.
One character’s advice inadvertently sums up both shows. “You can’t put meatloaf in the microwave and expect it to come out steak.”
