Poppa’s House.
Hey, it’s Damon Wayans! He’s got a grey beard, backwards Mets hat and TuPac shirt.
His son shows up at the kitchen window and … the audience laughs. I don’t understand why that’s funny.
Son enters and says he needs a favor. Wayans wants to take a sip of tea first. He takes a long time to do so, and the audience laughs wildly. I honestly don’t understand why they are laughing. Nothing funny has happened. Nothing at all has happened. I feel like they’re being polite? Or maybe obeying a sign?
I don’t have a sign. I don’t have a reason to watch this.
Wayans and son start dishing out the exposition. It’s not important. The audience laughs anyway. The son sells foam back rollers. Damon tries one and groans wildly. Because it’s so comfortable? Or painful? It’s not clear. One thing it clearly is, though, is funny, because the audience erupts. I just can’t. We’re done.
Time of death: 2 minutes.
George & Mandy’s First Marriage
Apparently, this is a spin off of Young Sheldon, which, was, in itself, a spin-off. So this is basically the Good Times of Big Bang Theory.
Except Good Times was watchable.
We open with a scene from Frasier, which is on the characters’ television. An extremely southern caricature says, “Frasier’s a laughin’ show. I like laughin’ shows,” in a terrible Goober accent. It turns out, he’s talking about shows that have laugh tracks, and, wait for it … this show itself has a laugh track.
But it’s not Frasier. It’s awful. This first scene is a controlled flight into terrain. Big Bang is rolling over in its grave. This is Big Bang’s … Frasier reboot.
Time of death: 32 seconds.
Happy’s Place
It’s Reba! On the Cheers set? They just auctioned the Cheers bar set off a few years ago, and from the looks of things, this show bought it.
Reba is a treasure, and she makes some truly awful dialogue work through sheer enthusiasm and likeability. She’s playing a new bar owner who inherited the business from her recently deceased dad.
“Did I hear your father died?” asks one customer.
“I hope so, because we buried him,” says Reba, selling the punchline through sheer Reba-ness.
Twist. The 20-something customer is an illegitimate child of Reba’s dad … so they’re sisters.
Credits, which are also performed by Reba. This show is basically a referendum on how much you love her. The rest of the cast is ho hum and the writing would need to improve drastically to reach ho hum level.
First scene without Reba comes at 14 minutes, and the promise of more Reba later isn’t worth enduring that. Time of death: 14 minutes.
