CBS
When networks program new shows, they often take into consideration “flow”—how well viewers will transition from one show into the new, hopefully compatible show. But there’s flow, and then there’s imitation so distractingly total that, in the case of CBS’s new Mad Love, the show might as well be called How I Met the Timeslot Companion to How I Met Your Mother.
There was the white-collar-young-people in New York setting, similar not just in social milieu but right down to the accessories: a bar that could have been the bar in HIMYM with a couple added Art Deco tchotchkes; the apartment which had virtually the same layout as Ted Mosby’s. Not only did Jason Biggs’ Ben share with Ted a monosyllabic name and the same quest for romantic commitment, but Biggs seems to have walked into the stylist’s chair with a magazine clipping of Josh Radnor. The setting, the premise, the pacing—Mad Love had pretty much every HIMYM element in its pilot, except for the laughs and the general likeability of the characters.
The likeability is a serious fault, since it should have been Mad Love’s greatest asset. It’s assembled a very likeable supporting cast of youngish sitcom veterans—Sarah Chalke, Tyler Labine and especially Judy Greer. But it was as if inside my head there was a little container labeled “Residual Goodwill Toward the Actors from Previous Projects,” and it drained over the course of the half-hour like someone had drilled a hole in the bottom.
The constant insult banter between Labine’s Larry and Greer’s Connie was especially grating: done well, that kind of humor can work and even be endearing (as I think it was intended here; think also Karen and Rosario on Will & Grace), but done as it was here—not even badly, just unremarkably—it just becomes an obvious source of constant jokes with the same premise. (The reason insult comedy can be a crutch is that, without it, your characters have to find new subjects to joke about every week; with it, at least one pair of characters has a constant go-to.)
It’s unfortunate, because I wanted to like this cast together more than usual. And there were flashes of promise, like the scene in which Larry tells Connie he realized early that he was never going to be the hero of any story in life. It was a potentially distractingly meta thing for a sidekick character to say—especially one played by professional sidekick Labine—but in the context of Larry’s telling us something he already knows about himself, it worked.
Ben, however, was almost a complete nonentity, and thus his budding relationship with Kate held no stakes, compared with the swoon-inducing romance the HIMYM pilot introduced between Ted and Robin. It’s an unfair comparison, maybe, but given that Mad Love so aggressively seems to invite it, one that it had coming. I’ll revisit the show at some point, but not even Bob Saget could have saved this pilot for me.