Review – Mad Love
Mad Love – CBS – 8:30/7:30pm Monday – USA
It’s becoming almost a weekly tradition this year for a new network to release another sitcom about a group of friends with relationship issues. It’s like its 1996 all over again. CBS got in on this game a few years ago with How I Met Your Mother, which took the basic template of Friends and made it its own. This season ABC have tried Better With You, NBC have Perfect Couples, FOX gave us Traffic Light, so why shouldn’t CBS get another shot at it? Enter Mad Love, settling into the timeslot directly behind How I Met Your Mother.
Actually How I Met Your Mother is the perfect show to compare Mad Love to because Mad Love looks and acts like some kind of alternative universe version of HIMYM. Mad Love stars Jason Biggs as Ted Mosby but Mad Love calls him ‘Ben’, which would be believable if Biggs didn’t look exactly like Ted right down to the same haircut. Biggs’ Ted falls in love with, wait for it, Sarah Chalke who we all remember Ted was engaged to over on HIMYM. So far, so flashsideways version of Mother. Biggs’ best friend is Tyler Labine (Soc from Reaper, Soc from Sons Of Tucson, playing a character who is yet another version of the loudmouth shtick he always pulls and should just be called Soc). Labine plays what is essentially a fat Barney, if Barney was awful. Judy Greer is the other lead but I have no HIMYM comparison for her so my theory dies here.
Look at that cast. Biggs is an affable lead. Sarah Chalke is always enjoyable. Labine has his moments and Judy Greer is hilarious. The other thing I seem to be repeating from Better to Perfect to Traffic to this is: great cast, shame the material isn’t up to scratch. This is probably the best cast out of all of those shows (although the Better With You gang do a great job of bringing a lot of laughs to some fairly slight material) but it also suffers from having the weakest writing of all those shows too.
Somebody somewhere decided that Labine’s irritating voice should narrate the show from some knowing point in the future where he’s seen what destiny has in store for these characters (see! How I Met Your Mother alt-universe version!) It’s a terrible decision as his character is an obnoxious grating bore, and this is coming from somebody who enjoyed Sons Of Tucson, so you know he’s really pushing all the wrong buttons this time out. While Biggs and Chalke meet and fall in love (at the top of the Empire State Building, where HIMYM once went!) while Labine and Greer meet and fall in hate… or will they fall in love later? Dun dun dunn!
Actually, now that I think about it, that premise also feels very much like Gavin & Stacey. Hmm. New theory: Mad Love is what would happen if How I Met Your Mother and Gavin & Stacey had an ugly, semi-retarded love child.
Mad Love suffers most because it just doesn’t try very hard. The gags in the pilot are fairly limp, and include this zinger delivered by Greer to Labine: “You look kind of familiar too but that could be because I went to a lot of pedophile conventions.” Which doesn’t make sense even by lame zinger standards. Why was she attending a lot of pedophile conventions? With a cast like this, even one that’s held down a bit by Labine chewing the scenery, there’s every chance that it could transform into a 100% worthwhile television show. It should be noted that that’s exactly what I said about those other three Friends knockoffs, so that statement can probably be taken with a giant grain of salt.
Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Bad
