Young Rock (Tuesdays at 8:00pm on NBC)
I'm not exactly sure why Young Rock exists in the format it exists in, but I'll give it points for one thing: it's a unique spin on a traditional family sitcom. Period pieces of barely-bygone eras have been all the rage in broadcast comedies of late (see: The Goldbergs, Schooled, The Kids Are Alright, Young Sheldon, etc.), so Young Rock is a basic addition to that trend, though it stands out for a couple of very obvious reasons: it's Dwayne Johnson (duh), the kind of major star that broadcast television has failed to attract in the last decade or so; and it's diverse as all hell, and very appealingly so.
Too bad it's not all that funny.
There are, for sure, some amusing moments in Young Rock, mostly thanks to an endearing performance by Adrian Groulx as ten year-old Dwayne and to an absurd framing device that has Fresh Off the Boat's Randall Park playing a future version of himself as a reporter interviewing 2032 presidential candidate Dwayne Johnson about his life. That's both the set-up and the pay-off of Young Rock: Johnson reflects on his childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. How much you're on board with that premise will also translate directly into how much you appreciate and enjoy Young Rock. Not caring one way or the other about Johnson, it put me immediately at arm's length with the show and then failed to really pull me back in.
Young Rock just doesn't have very many laugh-out-loud moments and too often gets bogged down in its own structure and time-jumping from future to distant past to less-distant past to least-distant past. All of this means we never get enough time spent in any one period to latch onto anything of import. We get snatches of story and lessons learned ("Work the gimmick," we hear over and over in the pilot), but there's nothing to latch onto, except for surface-level identifiers (Andre the Giant appears as a family friend during the childhood years, for example).
All of this is to say, there's not a whole lot for me to latch onto here. Dwayne Johnson fans, of which there are clearly legions, will probably find his (surprising) extended presence entertaining and the tales of his past likely fun. But those of us who just want a laugh and thought maybe the guy who replaced Robin Williams in Jumanji could provide that will need to look elsewhere for anything other than a few feel-good moments.
Kenan (Tuesdays at 8:30pm on NBC)
Kenan is a shocking misfire, squandering the talents of a well-above-average cast in a pilot that is completely laughless and uninspired. For a show featuring two of Saturday Night Live's funniest, most consistent cast members, it's painful to say that. Kenan's best characters on SNL are slightly absurd but still grounded in the real world; think his Steve Harvey and David Ortiz impressions. But Kenan gives its star too much of the latter and none of the former, leaving him to flounder in an empathetically vulnerable role that doesn't let him land a friggin' joke.
Instead, Chris Redd gets to be the slightly absurd character as Kenan's brother who stays up all night partying and getting "nine numbers" at the club ("I guess she forgot one" is the eye-rolling punchline) and doing eye wide-eyed thing Redd does well with one-liners on SNL. And Kenan's two daughters get the most running jokes, referring to their mother as "deceased parent," as one of their dad's self-help books encourages, and begging for their own smartphones so they can make Instagram accounts (like the two year-old neighbor who got a paid partnership for butt paste). But Kenan gets to flit from scene to scene being sad beneath the surface, packing lunches while creeping through the house before dawn, and trying to convince everyone around him that HE IS JUST FINE!
On the one hand, Kenan Thompson is always supremely watchable and likable. But I want him to be doing something else. His first pass at a sitcom was developed nearly a decade ago in fall 2012, and it obviously never went forward, and then this iteration of Kenan has been in development since fall of 2018 (when it was titled Saving Larry and was to focus more on the father-in-law character) and was ordered to series nearly two years ago before being pushed due to scheduling issues and then COVID. So for it to have taken this long to finally get Thompson his own primetime series, and for that series to be so uninteresting and unfunny, is a massive disappointment.
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