Thoughts on the new "The Odd Couple" and "Mr. Robinson"

To be honest, I don't watch a ton of TV. Mainly, I wait for a few seasons of a given show to pass, then if enough positive buzz surrounds the show, I find a way to binge-watch it and catch up. To illustrate how behind-the-times I am with TV, I just started watching "The Walking Dead" and "Sons of Anarchy." I did, however, find myself in front of my TV the other night with little to do and not much on (it's a slow time for sports, especially when your favorite baseball team has been dead in the water for months already), and watched the new incarnation of "The Odd Couple" with Matthew Perry and Thomas Lennon, plus the new show "Mr. Robinson" with the always-likable Craig Robinson.

I'm not going to do a detailed breakdown of each, because I wouldn't be a good judge of casting, acting, and those things that make up a television show. I pay attention to the writing, but that's about as close to being a TV "critic" as I get. For "The Odd Couple" and "Mr. Robinson," the writing seemed fine, especially considering how young these shows are in their development. The one thing that did strike me, though, was how both of these shows seemed outdated, which should never be the case with a brand new series.

Maybe it's because I've grown to despise the use of a laugh track, or maybe it's because I'm ignorant to most new shows, but I couldn't help thinking that "The Odd Couple" and "Mr. Robinson" just kept sinking further into the ocean of forgettable shows the more I watched. I really like all the main characters involved in each of the shows. Matthew Perry has good comedic sense and timing, I've been a fan of Tom Lennon's since "The State," and Craig Robinson has carved out a niche for himself that makes him as close to a singular talent as possible (his musical talent doesn't hurt this case at all, either).

Anyway, a good comedy show contains some semblance of a rhythm to it ... the jokes hit on beats. It might not be a uniform rhythm like in music, but it's hidden in the writing somewhere. That's what hit me the wrong way. It's entirely possible the the old-school networks are to blame, but watching these shows felt like Taylor Swift taking a composition by Beethoven, erasing most of the notes but leaving every fourth note (the "joke" notes), and trying to re-write the rest of the song around the skeleton of the Beethoven piece, in an attempt to make it her own. Which is to say: "The Odd Couple" and "Mr. Robinson" seemed to me to be written too much to structure that it was detrimental to each of them. Instead of finding their own rhythm, they took the standard good-but-not-great, white bread skeleton of a tried-and-true comedy show, erased the content, re-made it to make it somewhat their own, but still tried to hit all the same joke notes that have been hit a million times before. It's like in football, the common logic of yesteryear was that any good team had to run the ball and stop the run. That type of low risk/low reward style of play is a recipe for mediocrity in today's pass-happy game. It's time for network television to air it out a little instead of keeping their new shows on the ground.  

Note From Author

As you can see, the great majority of content here deals with sports. As the author of this page, I now write for LastWordOnSports.com, which obviously gets precedent over this little thing. If you would like more sports from me, head over to LWOS. However, my post about the State Farm commercial continues to get clicks, so I will continue to post here about non-sports stuff -- probably music, TV, and more take-downs of dumb commercials. Thanks for checking this here blog out.

-Ryan Timmerman (@TheDudeMan3)