I watched the premiere of Me, Myself & I last week and didn't care for it. I found it schmaltzy and inconsequential, a perfectly adequate addition to the comfortable CBS sitcom lineup with an interesting hook but no depth or stakes.
Then, last night, I watched the premiere of 9JKL and realized that, compared to this steaming turd, Me, Myself & I could be considered must-see-TV.
Let's start with the stinker: 9JKL is unwatchable. It seems every season CBS strands a wonderful cast in a terrible comedy (Man with a Plan, Angel from Hell, Friends with Better Lives, We Are Men, I could go on...), and this season that comedy is 9JKL.
To start, the title is infuriatingly stupid. Its original title was 9J 9K 9L, which isn't much better but at least makes sense; you get that these are apartments these people live in, but why would you mash all those letters up together? Maybe thematically it works, since the whole point of the show is that this family has no boundaries and might as well all live in one apartment, but as a title, it's total nonsense.
The writing is also nonsense. The jokes here are so broad and moronic, they make Howard Stern look sophisticated. In the opening teaser alone, there are jokes about Josh's (Mark Feuerstein, Royal Pains) bare butt, his father's testicles, and his mother's uterus. Hysterical! The rest of the 22-minute pilot gives us jokes about diarrhea, sperm, and breast milk, because apparently Feuerstein and his wife, Dana Klein, only know how to write comedy for 12 year old boys. There's certainly no sophistication in 9JKL's setup, which is based on the couple's real life situation but comes across as a shrunk-down version of Everybody Loves Raymond: divorced actor Josh moves in to the apartment between his overbearing, oversharing parents (Linda Lavin and Elliott Gould) and his brother (David Walton), sister-in-law (Liza Lapira) and infant niece. Isn't that funny? A grown man living near his parents! So unusual, so cutting edge! And just because, there's an annoying doorman (Matt Murray) and his child friend (Albert Tsai, brutally wasted in a pointless role).
I spent most of the pilot trying to figure out what exactly was meant to be funny about 9JKL. Was it the situation, itself? Because families living near to each other is common. Was it the intrusiveness of his parents? Because yeah, that could be annoying for an adult who wants privacy, but can't you just have a conversation with them about not breaking into your apartment to store their CostCo loot? (Well, maybe not, considering they're paying for the apartment.) Was it the jokes that concentrated almost exclusively on bodily functions and Jewish stereotypes? None of it was funny. None of it. And to make matters worse, the editors abused the hell out of the laugh track, buttoning nearly every line, even ones that weren't really intended as jokes, with obnoxious, cacophonous laughter.
It's depressing how bad 9JKL is, particularly in its treatment of legends like Lavin and Gould. It's depressing to hear Lavin reduced to jokes about Josh's balls, or Gould reduced to jokes about his own balls. This cast deserved better, and I blame Feuerstein, as the creator, writer and star. Do better next time, Mark. This is unacceptable.
Me, Myself & I (Mondays at 9:30 on CBS; moves to 9:00 on October 30)
After watching some as low-concept and mind-numbing as 9JKL, a show like Me, Myself & I looks high-brow.
We meet Alex Riley at age 14 (played by It standout Jack Dylan Grazer) as an aspiring inventor and perpetual loser in 1991. Then we meet Alex Riley at age 40 (SNL's Bobby Moynihan) in present day as he goes through a divorce and custody battle for his daughter. And finally we meet Alex Riley at age 65 (John Laroquette) as he retires from the company he built.
Let's start with the positive: it's an intriguing concept for a sitcom to follow one character through three very distinct time periods. Young Alex comes with all the anxiety of a teenager (plus the 90s setting allows for some nostalgic humor); older Alex affords some opportunity to play with what the writers' ideas of the future are like. Both are solid foundations. Present-day Alex is a little shakier, since nothing really makes him unique, including the situation he finds himself in. But it's a fun idea, if you don't think too hard about it; rather than include characters of different ages to mine those eras of life for comedy, we have it all happening to the same person. It's cute.
But it also takes out a lot of the tension in the pilot, particularly as it pertains to present-day Alex. We know that the drama with his daughter is solved, because we see her interacting with her father in the future. We know his dry-spell of inventions clears up because he owns a successful company. This kind of tensionless storytelling also leaks into young Alex's storyline. He meets and has a disastrous first kiss with Nori, a girl he never stops thinking about... but we know he never gets together with her in the 1990s timeline because they don't meet again until the future timeline. It's an odd way to structure the character arcs, making you care less and less what happens in the stories being told because we know how they resolve. That type of storytelling can be effective when done right, as it is on This Is Us. But there's no central hook to Alex's life, no mystery that needs solving, to keep us coming back.
This lack of dramatic interest continues into the supporting players, all of whom make very little impression. Only Alex's stepbrother Justin is memorable for how gung-ho he is about having Alex sharing a room with him. Jaleel White plays 40 year-old Alex's best friend, but his scenes are brief and forgettable. Even Alex himself makes almost no lasting impression because of the whiplash of telling his story in three different times over the course of a measly 23ish minutes. We never get a real sense of Alex, never learn much about him that makes us root for him, in any timeline. Present-day Alex is clearly the one we're supposed to relate to, his struggles universal and understandable. But Moynihan doesn't have the electric presence of Grazer or Laroquette, and he doesn't get a definable story (just characteristics: sad, divorced, angry, stuck at work, etc), so the whole thing kind of falls apart at the seams.
You can also smell the syrup from a mile away. The pilot clearly draws upon the formula that made This Is Us such a massive hit, heaping on the saccharine moments until it's enough to make your teeth ache: botched first kiss, meeting the "love of your life" 50 years later in a serendipitous moment, the threat of losing your child in a divorce, heart-to-heart talks with the first father figure a young boy has ever known, etc. Any cliche you can think of, it's probably played out in Me, Myself & I. Having said that, there is something heartwarming about a genuine, heart-on-its-sleeve goopy sitcom (think Full House). It may not break the mold, despite how hard it tries to with its concept, but it does deliver some warm and fuzzies where hearty laughs would be preferable.
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