Review – Better With You

Better With You – ABC – 8:30/7:30pm Wednesday – USA

Last Fall TV season ABC took a risk and launched a brand new night of TV comedy on Wednesdays with Hank, The Middle, Modern Family and Cougar Town. With three of those four shows surviving to this season ABC only needed to replace the one weak link: Hank. Hank was an atrocious laugh track backed sitcom that didn’t gel well with the other three single camera comedies. ABC have replaced it with Better With You, which is also a traditional sitcom with a laugh track, but works better with the casual laidback laugh magnets it shares the night with than the quickly cancelled Hank ever did.

Better With You offers us nothing that we haven’t seen before, but it presents these tired ideas in an effortlessly enjoyable manner that it’s hard not to have some fun with the show. Better With You is about three couples: Newly dating Mia & Casey played by Joanna Garcia (Privileged) and Jack Lacy. Together 9 years Maddie & Ben played by Jennifer Finnigan (Close To Home) and Josh Cooke (Four Kings). And married couple Vicky & Joel played by sitcom veterans Debra Jo Rupp (That 70’s Show) and Kurt Fuller (literally everything, but I’m going to cherry pick That’s My Bush!). Mia & Maddie are sisters, and Vicky & Joel are their parents, with Casey & Ben on the outside looking in.

This is all fairly conventional stuff; dating in the big city combined with typical family conflicts. Even the four leads personality types can be defined through Friends; Mia is the Rachel, Maddie is the Monica, Ben is the Ross and Casey is the Joey. We’ve seen slight variations on this same idea countless times over the last year with Romantically Challenged, 100 Questions, and Rules Of Engagement, and while Better With You is more enjoyable than those three shows it doesn’t ever reach the heights of that other big romantic comedy How I Met Your Mother simply because Better With You doesn’t seem to want to try.

Everything about Better With You, from its title, to its premise, to its one-liners and even its casting, isn’t taking any risks. This is risk free comedy. Why should it try to break the mould, or even slightly nudge the mould, when it can settle on routine quips like “Getting married after 2 months, what is she? A Kardashian?” Why think of interesting new ways to spin classic scenarios when instead you can just plonk every character in a cab and make jokes about how married couples don’t have sex anymore?

At one point Ben is giving Casey tips on how to impress the new in-laws, he reminds Casey that “people like gentle comedy”. It seems that Better With You has taken that as a mission statement. This is a gentle comedy. The performances a generally winning, although Maddie is kind of irritating and Casey is trying far too hard to act dumb. There are laughs to be had, and I chuckled for most of the first episode but Better With You fails to leave much of an impact. It just isn’t trying very hard. It’s funny, it’s likeable but it has the ambitions of a tramp; just do enough to get through the day, why aim for anything bigger than that? Better With You makes for an affable diversion while it’s on but you’ll likely forget it ever happened once the end credits start to roll.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Alright