You know that opening scene in that not great movie The Way of The Gun where Ryan Phillippe, doosh, has this crazy, foul-mouthed banter with this dark-haired, lady-cretin who rages and rants in a way that is incredibly awful, yet shamefully funny in its offensiveness, but then a few years later lots of people love her for it, and yes, well, many of us said, “Hey, Sarah Silverman was that sick, twisted chick from the opening scene of that movie all my stoner friends told me about. Yeah, that’s her. Wow. She’s come a long way.” Well none of that happened with this Whitney Cummings person.
We have no idea where she came from. We just woke up one morning and she was at the foot of our bed looking out at us from inside a TV with her own first-name titled sitcom on NBC, a network that used to bring us “Must See TV” Thursday night comedies. And now, well, now they’re apparently picking up any old soiled mattress of an actor sitting by the curb, slapping a nurse’s uniform on her, and letting her tell us the rules of dating.
Sounds like a winner. Except it’s not.
Let’s start here, shall we? Before her new show Whitney aired this week, Cummings did a bit of a promotional tour where she hit up the morning talk shows. Therein she did some sort of rapid-fire bionic mouth olympics to describe her new show. (So loud. So much.) Here she is with the Today Show’s Ann Curry. And two seconds in something happens that’s priceless. Watch Ann Curry try and convince Whitney Cummings that a New York Times review, which said her new show is “Comically Abominable,” is a good thing, and Cummings’ befuddled response. HA!
Payback perhaps? Somewhere at around the 3:30 mark Whitney talks about her co-star and how he’s single, cue eye wiggle to Ann Curry, who puts up a hand and says that she’s married, to which Whitney responds “So What!” Sheesh. Curry, stunned, says “Whoaa!” and seems a bit repulsed as she looks off camera for a second before all the nervous “Did She Really Say I Should Cheat On My Husband?” giggle-farts start. I call them giggle-farts because they’re giggles that you don’t mean to do. They slip out due to embarrassment and shock. I think this sets up rather nicely the main elements to Whitney’s new show. It’s abominable. There are relationship jokes here that work only if you live in Whitney Cummings’ world, and the rest of the time you’ll shift uncomfortably in your chair while you watch her try too hard.
Not Holding Back on the Laugh-Track: I don’t know if it’s the Two and a Half Men thing, or what, but laugh tracks are back with a vengeance. Like these are ninja laugh tracks. It’s not a thin bit of canned laughter. Oh, no. This sounds like someone is about to asphyxiate from the uncontrolled bit of hilarity that’s just rolled itself out on set like a gyrating Alec Baldwin in a transparent Speedo. The guffaws are just that raucous and delirious, and we’re talking about a clip about needing an insurance card to get sex, or a stupid pratfall, or Whitney, instead of looking for lingerie, pulling out a hammer and contemplating how to add it to foreplay. These are all things that happened during the episode and the omnipresent laugh-track kept going and going like a runaway train of nitrous oxide. I’ll maintain that in her attempt to be witty, quirky, and fun largely Whitney comes off as annoying, a nag, a know-it-all, and not funny enough to pull off all three. There is an art to being the snarky, sass queen. And Whitney attempts to tell us with every joke, with every purse of her lips, lilt of an eyebrow, and snap of her ponytail that “Yes, I Am, Funny!” And that’s the unfunniest thing of all.
A Thing She Probably Thought Sounded Better in Her Head: You know how someone can tell you a joke and it may be the funniest thing ever? But if you were to see someone act it out, mostly you’d say, “Why am I watching this? What does this mean?” all while you’re waiting to be entertained. Many of the Whitney jokes happen this way. They vacillate from contrived, predictable territory, or like this nurse gag, a cringe-inducing laugh-track fest that’s way too obvious. Way too typical 1990’s sitcom fare, and most of all calls for a suspension of belief that becomes uncomfortable halfway through. Funny is in subtlety. It’s in the small details that if you’re not thinking as quickly as the writer you’ll miss it. You want to have those moments when you turn to the person next to you and say, “Did Phil just call himself Phyllis while attempting to say Phil is? HA!” (Modern Family. Watch the premiere.) You need the writing not to dumb it down to Sitcom 101. You want to almost miss the joke but catch it at the last second. What you don’t want is for a gag to run too long (Whitney) and when they’ve eked all they can out of it, pile on another few seconds of head smacking reinforcement of the same lame joke.
Don’t Tell Us Your Agenda. Let us Discover it: We no longer need a message in our sitcoms. We don’t need someone to tell us what this episode is about, or what the show is about, or what you ultimately want us to know about your series. We’re smart, we can figure out that your show is about family relationships, or your kids, or your job. At this point in the sitcom game to say, “This show is about marriage or the lack there of. How do you know? Because there will be a wedding two minutes in! We’ll say marriage about fifty times! Everyone will refer to it! Everyone will want to talk about it! We’ll dissect it! And try to keep this one joke alive for everyone involved!” makes us feel as though you don’t trust us to get. it. And what’s not to get? The episode took this theme and ran all the way to Canada with it. All the relationships and friendships mirrored Whitney’s feelings about marriage. Instead of making them people or leaving them as the caricatures they were, perhaps they should’ve all worn sandwich boards that showcased their archetype special of the day. “Hi, I’m Whitney’s mother, the divorcee’. Hi, We’re Whitney’s married couple friends. Hey, I’m Whitney’s “Marriage is a Contract” boyfriend. What’s up, I’m the scorned best friend. Yo, I’m single-guy douche!” And so on, and so on. We never discovered the ideas, or the personalities…they were all drawn for us one dimensionally.
Why Should We Care?: This will ultimately be your challenge, Whitney. If you’re going to do a show about your point of view and how you see relationships, we’ll have to care about you, or at least make us think you’re someone we’d like to hang out with. Right now, though, you seem a bit like that girl we haven’t hung out with since college mostly because, frankly, she was a bit of a neurotic attention seeker back then, especially when she tried to disguise it as quirky and fun! But really it was more awkward and irritating. So you’ll have your work cut out for you, especially since Zooey Deschanel and Kat Dennings have pretty much mastered their personalities in the whole adorable, quirky, fun zone. But you know that already, since you created Kat’s new show. They own their quirks and don’t much care if you like it or not. It may stem from the fact that they can and will be cast in movies based on personality alone, and they know it.
Whitney, you want us to like you. You really do. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have created this staid and outdated, (re: safe) model for yourself. But what you should know is that good television today is about risks, or putting the unconventional in a conventional environment, and for the love of Jaga reducing the amount of multi-camera laugh-track hinging comedies in the world. Mostly though, in whatever format it’s presented in, we need a story that makes us care, makes us laugh, and makes us want to at best identify with you, or at the very least grab a beer with you. Right now we’re not even sure we’d say “Hi” if we saw you in the supermarket.
Photo: sarahplanet.com
