Relationship-challenged loners forge an unlikable alliance

Opinion

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This article was published 30/03/2015 (3315 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s a proven fact that sitcom characters don’t have to be likable; Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld turned four of the most detestable individuals in TV history into the most successful and lucrative comedy ever.

They don’t have to be likable, but they do have to believable, and they do have to be interesting, and they do have to be funny in a way that makes viewers want to come back, again and again, to find out what they’re going to do next.

The new Fox comedy Weird Loners features a foursome of central characters whose behaviour ranges from reprehensible to pitiful (without ever venturing into the realm of relatably pleasant), but it has created a problem for itself by failing to make them sufficiently intriguing that this not-quite-groundbreaking comedy merits a “must-see” designation.

And that’s too bad because Weird Loners, which premières tonight at 8:30 on Fox and Citytv, does deliver some genuinely amusing moments. They just aren’t enough of them to compensate for the characters’ overriding flaws.

The premise is simple and, it turns out, rather flimsy: four very different people in their 30s, each of whom has unable to find a special someone with whom to share life’s journey, suddenly find themselves sharing space in a side-by-side townhouse in Queens, N.Y.

Caryn (Becki Newton) is a dental hygienist whose approach to dating tends toward the desperate and clingy — in the première, she’s seen quizzing a dinner date about his commitment to their relationship and it soon becomes apparent that they met two days earlier on a cruise ship and their “relationship” amounts to drunk-humping a couple of times in a lifeboat.

She suggests couples counselling; he shouts, “Check, please!” and flees with all due haste.

Stosh (Zachary Knighton) is a dental-equipment salesman whose penchant for bedding the wives and girlfriends of his co-workers has just cost him his job, his car and his company-financed condo; fortunately, he finds a place to crash when his long-ignored cousin Eric (Nate Torrence) is left alone by the sudden death of his live-in dad.

As coincidence would have it, Eric lives in the brownstone that adjoins the one where Caryn resides. And when Eric encounters — on one of his rare trips out into the neighbourhood — a street artist named Zara who offers him a ride home after he buys one of her paintings, a loosely knit foursome of friends is formed — all of them single and none of them likely to change that status anytime soon because of their varying degrees of weirdness.

They’re weird. And they’re alone. They’re weird loners, and now they’re ready to take on the world together. Hilarity is scheduled to ensue, but…

The problem is that three of them — Caryn, Stosh and Eric — are so deeply dysfunctional that when they do exhibit normal human behaviour, it simply isn’t believable. Caryn’s desperation for a relationship is matched by an equally severe fear of commitment, so nothing she does makes much sense. Stosh is a pig, plain and simple, but makes occasional and inexplicable forays into deeply compassionate behaviour (such as pretending to be Caryn’s fiancé when it seems she’s going to have to break her grandmother’s heart by confessing that her engagement to a bland doctor has ended) that seem totally out of character.

And poor Eric, whose world basically ended when his best and only friend, his dad, dropped dead while the two of them were watching a Mets game on TV, is either so lacking in worldly experience that he’s clueless about real life or is actually suffering from an intellectual deficit of some sort; either way, he’s a character whom you feel like you’re laughing at, rather than with, and that’s a bit uncomfortable.

Zara, the artist, is the least well-defined of the four; our introduction to her comes as we watch her trying to sneak out of the apartment she’d been sharing with her boyfriend. When he asks if she was planning to leave without telling him it’s over, her response is, “No, there’s a muffin basket coming later.” Beyond that, she remains mostly undefined through the first couple of episodes.

There are a few effective sight gags, as well as snippets of giggle-inducing dialogue in the early going, which suggests Weird Loners’ writing staff can deliver the goods and the episodes could improve over time. The problem is that there might not be enough time to get there; the brand of weirdness these characters bring to prime time might result in the worst kind of alone-ness — the audience/ratings kind — that a new TV show can suffer.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @BradOswald