One of the weird things about being a TV critic is that you remember all these shows that nobody ever watched and have slipped into obscurity within weeks or even minutes of their debuts. Each is associated with some odd little fact or life lesson about television. For instance, though the world has long forgotten a 2008 sitcom called Unhitched, I will always remember it as the first (and, I sincerely hope, last) TV show ever to have pixilated a shot of monkey genitalia. Or Pasadena, a 2001 murder-mystery drama that I will always recall as the quintessential example of network programmers’ refusal to admit failure: Fox put it on hiatus after three weeks, never aired another episode but to this day hasn’t admitted that the show is canceled.
All this brings us to Perfect Couples, a new NBC sitcom that by next month will have been reduced to the answer to the trivia question What was the most forgettable network show to debut in January 2011? ( A. Ummm. …) It’s going to stick in my memory as an example of how hard it really is to make good TV shows.
On paper, Perfect Couples looks like a surefire hit. It’s got superb TV bloodlines, with one producer (Jon Pollack) from 30 Rock, the most savage subversive comedy in the history of the medium, and another (Scott Silveri) from Friends, the warmest relationship comedy ever made. It’s got an endlessly productive premise, the inexorable approach of real adulthood as people reach their early 30s. And it’s got six cute and seemingly talented stars.
On screen, however, it’s another matter. There’s nothing really wrong with the show, at least nothing you can easily put your finger on. It just lacks that elusive but absolutely necessary spark of life that turns a stack of script pages and publicity stills into something that will stop you from clicking the remote.
There are three perfect couples: the New Age-relationship blatherers Rex and Leigh (Hayes MacArthur, She’s Out of My League, and Olivia Munn, Attack of the Show); the wild, fight-till-they-fornicate Vance and Amy (David Walton, 100 Questions, and Mary Elizabeth Ellis, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia), and the relatively sober, just-this-short-of-being-grown up Dave and Julia (Kyle Bornheimer, Worst Week, and Christine Woods, Flash Forward).
In a series of constantly shifting alignments, they fight among themselves over sex, money, food, people they slept with long before they knew one another and whether they should try out for American Idol. (“Your voice makes me want to kill myself!”) This can be quite funny, for a little while, particularly the deadpan recitation of nauseating relationship bromides by Vance and Amy: “By reviewing our needs, we forge a bond, two becoming one.”
But well before the end of the first episode, the show is running out of gas, the characters unable get beyond their defined limits, the punch lines turning mechanical. By the second, I was wondering if anybody would catch me if I hit the fast-forward button. Though I did get one last laugh when relationship gurus Rex and Leigh tried to mediate a fight between the crazed Vance and Amy. The response: “Go to hell! This is none of your business! Shove your psychobabble up your [bleep]!.” This time next year, I’ll be trying to remember the name of that shove-your-psychobabble-up-your-bleep show.