TV Reviews: Selfie and A to Z

Pilots for sitcoms are hard to evaluate, because they not only have to be funny, but they have to establish the premise, introduce the characters, and leave the door open for more wacky adventures next week. Often, one of two things will happen: either the pilot will be lovingly crafted over years by the writer, creating a brilliant half-hour playlet that subsequent episodes can’t come close to; or the writer has to make a bunch of compromises with corporate suits just to get the pilot made, but then when the suits are too busy to hover over the series, the true quality can emerge.

One hopes the latter will happen with Selfie, a modest new sitcom on ABC’s Tuesday night line-up. The pilot shows signs of corporate meddling. “Hey, can we get a gratuitous shot of Karen Gillian in her underwear? You know what’s funny? People spilling barf on themselves. Can you put that in?”

On other hand, the show is a variation of Pygmalion, which was once turned into a little movie called My Fair Lady. So there is definitely room for growth.  The show also features two extremely likable stars, Karen Gillian (Doctor Who, also Guardians of the Galaxy although you’d never recognize her) and John Cho (the Star Trek movie franchise, the late lamented Go On, Sleepy Hollow). A lot of sitcoms have lasted longer than a season with worse casts than that.

The twist on My Fair Lady is that there Eliza Doolittle’s burden was her poverty; in Selfie, Eliza Dooley’s problem is due to affluence.  Gillian’s Dooley is a top sales person at a pharmaceutical company (I think; I wasn't quite clear on that) who has a bad social media day (see the reference to barf, above) and realizes that she needs fewer Facebook friends and more friends that actually like her. The pilot spent so much time setting that up that they neglected the back story on Cho’s character, Henry Higgs (the names aren’t exactly subtle), a marketing analyst (again, I think) whom Dooley begs to help her connect more with real people.

It’s plain to see what Dooley hopes to get out of the arrangement, but it is less clear why Higgs wants to help her.  Other than the fact that she’s gorgeous, but that doesn't seem to penetrate his consciousness in the pilot, so who knows? Higgs finds everything about her annoying, yet he seems to feel the need to help her because the plot demands it. One can only hope future episodes flesh out this relationship more thoroughly (speaking of flesh, did I mention Gillian was in her underwear in the pilot?).

The producers of How I Met Your Mother did the nearly impossible; after a build-up of eight years, they cast an actress as the titular Mother who was as wonderful, charming, beautiful, and winning as advertised. They then killed her off, but never mind. It is with that background that I approached the new NBC sitcom A to Z, starring the Mother herself, Cristin Miloti.

This pilot strikes me as the first kind I mentioned, so cute and precious that it feels like someone spent a long time getting all these details just so. But once the pilot is over, even though we are promised 25 more episodes (each named after a letter of the alphabet, just like a Sue Grafton novel). The pilot for A to Z is intricately plotted with lots of flair, from flashbacks to voiceovers (for the record, I am in favor of anything that provides work for Katy Sagal), but one doubts the writing staff can keep up that level of intricacy.  How cute is the pilot? The male lead’s name is Andrew and the woman’s is Zelda (A to Z! Get it?).

While the show lovingly spools out the details of the relationship of the central couple, played by Miloti and Ben Feldman (almost unrecognizable from his brilliant turn as Ginsberg on Mad Men), it relies on standard sitcom tropes for the supporting cast, including a stereotypical obnoxious best friend for him, a stereotypical over-sexed best friend for her, and an oafishly obnoxious boss for him. Since she works for what she refers to as a horrible law firm in the pilot, one assumes she’ll have an obnoxious boss in the future.

The pilot is too cutesy to be laugh out loud funny, and when it swings for the fences it whiffs big time. Feldman and Miloti have great chemistry (I suspect Miloti would have chemistry with a spice rack) but people don’t watch sitcoms for chemistry. Sam and Diane had chemistry on Cheers; they were also really funny.