Review – 2 Broke Girls

2 Broke Girls – CBS – 8:30/7:30pm Monday – USA

The new CBS sitcom 2 Broke Girls has been given the plum timeslot inbetween two of the network’s longest running hits, How I Met Your Mother and Two & A Half Men. This comedy about a pair of ‘broke girls’ struggling to wake their way in New York City has a style and an attitude that manages to fit perfectly with both those shows, and that’s as good and as bad as you might imagine. There’s a strong ‘hanging out while growing up in NYC’ vibe (like How I Met Your Mother!) combined with a snarky mean streak (like Two & A Half Men! Seriously, they killed their main character and then laughed about it, a lot – that show is mean even if the character was played by Charlie Sheen). Where 2 Broke Girls ultimately lands on that scale between the hilarious inventiveness of HIMYM and the tired zingers of Two & A Half Men will determine its success.

2 Broke Girls stars Kat Dennings as Max, a broke twenty-something who waits tables at a dingy diner and who doesn’t take crap from nobody. She’s soon joined by a new waitress named Caroline (Beth Behrs) who has only recently become a broke girl after her billionaire father, a Bernie Madoff type, was sent to prison and all of his bank accounts frozen. This original odd couple join up to take on the world by exchange quips and dropping pop culture references by the dozen. The supporting cast of 2 Broke Girls is kept mostly one-note in this premiere but they include a sleazy chef named Oleg, a sweet old black guy named Earl, and the owner of the diner an Asian man who changes his name to Bryce to make him sound more American – but Max helpfully points out that now his name is Bryce Lee. Laugh.

I’m beginning to see a trend with the comedies of Fall 2011 and that is: they’re not very funny. That sounds like more of an insult that it actually is, but 2 Broke Girls, like Up All Night and Free Agents before it, looks good, has a solid cast, and has everything a successful comedy needs except for that key ingredient of ‘laughs’. It’s frustrating to not be able to make any definite decision about any of these sitcoms beyond ‘I didn’t mind it’ and ‘it could get good’ but that’s just how comedy is sometimes. Too often have I decided a comedy wasn’t worth it only for the show turn into one of the funniest shows on TV (Parks & Recreation, Cougar Town, Happy Endings) and while there have probably been more shows that started crap and stayed crap (Mike & Molly, Running Wilde, Mad Love) it makes more sense to hedge my bets rather than dismiss a show outright after a lacklustre premiere episode.

The difference between 2 Broke Girls and those other comedies that have debuted so far is that 2 Broke Girls has a laugh track. Laugh track comedies don’t bother me, I love How I Met Your Mother, and I was one of the few people that really enjoyed the sadly cancelled Better With You last season. The laugh track only bothers me when the laughter doesn’t line up with what’s actually happening on the show – the audience is laughing at something you don’t find funny, so you register that you’re not laughing. The laughter isn’t obnoxious in 2 Broke Girls, but it did signal to me that the studio audience we having more fun than I was.

Part of the problem was that most of the jokes were ‘pop culture references’, and I don’t mean that the jokes included a pop culture reference I mean that the joke WAS a pop culture reference. Caroline tells a shirtless beefcake to step away from her by saying “Back up Jersey Shore”, Max is a nanny to two babies named Brad and Angelina, and in the most awkwardly worded ‘aren’t we up current trends?!’ gag of the night Earl lets out this doozy “You might as well be a night maid at the Schwarzenegger house: YOU GOT SCREWED.” Because remember how Arnold Schwarzenegger screwed his night maid? Pop culture references only become a problem when they instantly date a comedy. Not all pop culture references are created equal, Community doing an elaborate My Dinner With Andre spoof works because My Dinner With Andre is already 30 years old, it isn’t being used purely as a punchline, and it remains funny whether you know what My Dinner With Andre is or not – 2 Broke Girls saying “Back up Jersey Shore” relies entirely on the pop culture reference for the laughs, as soon as Jersey Shore stops being culturally relevant the joke dates the show.

The pop culture references are only detrimental if 2 Broke Girls relies entirely on them for its laughs. References to Caroline looking like she should be ‘in a show on Bravo’ or jokes about Twitter passwords only become a problem if 2 Broke Girls can’t rise above them, which is a similar problem The Big Bang Theory had in its first season where the ‘geek references’ were achingly obvious things like ‘Star Wars shampoo’ that were the entire joke. Even though most of the jokes don’t land there’s still a lot to like about 2 Broke Girls, Kat Dennings is great as Max, and the show acts like a series that’s been on the air for a few years, and I mean that in a good way – it feels comfortable with itself and it has a distinct look. As soon as 2 Broke Girls starts bringing the laughs this will be a show worth watching, but for now it’s just another case of the ‘wait and see’ sitcom.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Bad 

Advertisement