Hackneyed is possibly an overused word in describing bad television, but that doesn’t make it any less accurate. Lazy, half-hearted, simple, forced, these are all qualities of hackneyed writing. Friends with Better Lives has all of this in spades.
Friends with Better Lives feels as if it was written by a machine whose model was built by constant watching of second tier ‘90s sitcoms, with the morals and sensibilities for more risque, profane, and sexually open 21st century audiences. It’s all the jokes you know, except now they’re about blowjobs, and while maybe the joke was sometimes always about that, there used to be two steps removed between the act and the joke to keep in line with the morals of the time, and now it’s half a step.
Friends with Better Lives is part of the post-friends verse of making shows that star six people in their 20s and 30s, and it’s part of the sub-genre of these shows featuring people in different stages of relationships. There’s a somewhat long-time married couple that fits every married cliche – they’ve gotten lazy, they’re no longer as fiery or passionate as they once were, but underneath, their marriage, as they realize late in the first episode, is strong. There’s the two young lovebirds, who get engaged on a whim after only dating for a few weeks. They’re head over heels and all about the sex, but a little flighty and scatter brained, making grand romantic gestures all the time, which both irritate and rouse jealousy of the old married couple. Finally, there’s a man getting divorced, and a single woman desperate to find a man, but whose pickiness and quickness to render judgment make it difficult.
You know the jokes. The married couple is in such a rut they forget their anniversary! Then, in a surprise that could have been written by a shitty TV scribe version of O. Henry, the married wife tries to spice up the marriage by coming home and giving her husband a blowjob when the lights are out, not knowing that a couple dozen of their closest friends are waiting to surprise her for a party. Oops! The jokes are loud and hammy – you can’t miss them, although you won’t be laughing.
I hate to have to waste a few sentences of this review on this (I don’t really, there’s not that much to say), but if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. If your show has a laugh track, it’s hard for me to take your show seriously. I don’t need to rehash every terrible aspect of the laugh track, and if you’re reading this, you probably hate them as much (or close, at least) as I do, but if networks keep putting them in shows, I’m going to keep commenting on them. This laugh track was particularly bad, if it’s still possible to grade the relative bad-ness of laugh tracks in this day and age. The laugh track was the single biggest factor in making me not want to watch an episode, and in a show of this quality, that says a lot.
The show doesn’t really care. This isn’t a real attempt to make a good show. That may go for most CBS comedies but it’s no less true here. In this day and age when there are so many channels and shows on TV, it means there are more gems than ever but still just as many rote written by the numbers shows that keep getting made because occasionally people still watch them, but usually not. Pretty easy to predict this one won’t be around for long.
Will I watch this show again? Are you kidding? No. No. Come on. You should know me better than that by now.
Television, the Drug of the Nation 