Go On - Series Premiere - Episodes 1 and 2 - Recap and Review
Matthew Perry has had a bit of a rough time connecting with TV audiences long before Go On made its official premiere tonight on NBC. Since Friends aired its final episode in 2004, both ABC and NBC have tried to mount new series as a vehicle for Perry, and while the quality of the results have been fair (Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip) to underwhelming (Mr. Sunshine), each attempt has met with the same end: unceremonious cancellation.
So the question is why bother with another try? Friends was been done for nearly a decade, and while Matt LeBlanc and Lisa Kudrow are going through something of a career renaissance, it's hard to imagine that any of these actors will be able to live off of the residual goodwill of the series into perpetuity. They'll need to find some other project on which to hang their hat. Go On, the new series from former Friends writer-executive producer Scott Silveri, is as good a vehicle as any for Perry to try.
The series seems tailor-made to Perry's style, with his usual persona straddling the border between caustic pessimism and childlike glee, and always armed with rapid-fire witticisms. Premiering with a preview after the Olympics back in August, Go On follows Ryan King, a popular sports radio host struggling with the recent death of his wife. King, looking forward to returning to work after his month-long hiatus, is ordered by his boss (Harold and Kumar's John Cho) to attend grief counseling before he can resume hosting duties. This leads him to the support group, which is a collection of oddballs reminiscent of NBC's own Community, each with their own private tragedies, which we learn through a competitive tournament dubbed March Sadness. Over the course of the pilot, we learn the following about each of the characters:
Anne (Julie White): A lesbian lawyer who deals with her grief through anger over the highly-preventable death of her partner.
Owen (Tyler James Williams): A young man whose older brother is in a coma as the result of a skiing accident.
Mr. K (Brett Gelman): A grabby, bearded weirdo who doesn't talk about his grief because everyone is too weirded out to ask him about it.
Yolanda (Suzy Nakamura): A woman upset over the divorce of her parents.
Don (Khary Payton): A man whose wife divorced him after he lost all his money.
Sonia (Sarah Baker): A clingy recluse whose cat died.
Fausta (Tonita Castro): An older Hispanic woman whose lost members of her family.
George (Bill Cobbs): An elderly blind man with a litany of health concerns.
Leading the group is Lauren Schneider (Laura Benanti), a therapist more concerned with dealing with the grief as opposed to ignoring it through humor, as Ryan does. This causes her to come off as a bit of a shrill killjoy, which is made worse when we learn she is without scholarly qualifications, and is hired off of her success as part of a motivational Weight Watchers campaign. There's chemistry between Benanti and Perry, though it's very slight and easy to overlook, and while I'm certain the rapport will develop as the series moves forward, it would probably be best if the show didn't hang its hat on the possibility of these two characters' romantic entanglement.
Credit: NBC
That said, the pilot is merely table-setting for the series, going forward, as we see Ryan flip out on Terrell Owens, a guest on his show, for texting while driving, which dovetails into the revelation that King's wife was killed because she was texting him while driving. Perry is very good at communicating the loneliness and despair of a man who's lost “the only girl I ever loved,” and a montage that follows each of the characters in the group as they go through their daily routine, a clear void at the center of each of their lives, is a highlight. This group focus pays off in the conclusion, when the gang comes together to chase after a Google Maps car, dressed like Vikings. Overall, it was a fine premiere.
Not so good, however, was the follow-up, which seemed to focus more on Ryan King's daily work life. It's already been established that work is one of the ways Ryan deals with his grief, in addition to humor, but these elements feel like part of an entirely different show. The plot centers around Ryan forcing his assistant, Carrie (Allison Miller), to work late with him so that he doesn't have to go home to an empty house. It's a very labored sitcom trope to have the tag-along (though, to be fair, the tag-along isn't usually the show's lead), and it doesn't work any better here. The central plot brings nothing new to the table except for Ryan's tendency to mentor people, usually for the worse (as he encourages Sonia to dump her boyfriend and replace him with a new cat), ultimately concluding in an unearned bit of sentiment at the end when Carrie reaffirms her willingness to think of him when he isn't around.
If there isn't much to say about Go On, thus far, it's because it's a show that really needs at least four episodes before we can really have any idea of what it's trying to do. There's certainly promise here, but it could very easily go pear-shaped in no time flat. The pilot was good though it felt as though there was too much going on, too much to be established; the follow-up felt as though it had almost nothing of consequence happening at all. It might just be the disconnect between the dramedy Go On is when it's dealing with the therapy group, and the workplace sitcom it tries to be when Ryan King is at work. It will be very hard to reconcile these two shows, and it'll be better served sticking with the former instead of the latter. Regardless, I hope they figure it out soon. NBC doesn't have a track record of giving its new comedies much time to find a niche before the ax comes down.
