Reviews: 'The Knights of Prosperity,' 'In Case of Emergency'

By Rick Porter

    

January 2, 2007 5:37 PM ET

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With the Wednesday premieres of According to Jim, The Knights of Prosperity and In Case of Emergency, ABC will quadruple the number of half-hour comedies currently on its schedule. That kind of says all you need to know about the state of the sitcom at the network right now.

Jim is starting its sixth(!) season at 8 p.m. ET, and we suspect it will be pretty much what it's always been -- easy and safe, the TV equivalent of grilled cheese and tomato soup. With the two new shows, though, ABC tries for something a little bolder, and goes 1-for-2.

The score comes from Knights (9 p.m.) a loose, goofy and frequently quite funny show about a group of amateur criminals who embark on a quixotic quest to rob Mick Jagger (who appears in the pilot and is utterly at ease with mocking himself as he prattles on to an E! camera about yogurt baths and his "hat room").

Donal Logue (Grounded for Life) stars as Eugene Gurkin, a night janitor who sees the story about Jagger's massive Manhattan apartment on TV and decides then and there that it's the ticket to his destiny. He assembles a crew, has some T-shirts made and sets about his task.

Problem is, neither Eugene nor any of his cohorts has any idea how to do that, save perhaps for Esperanza (Sofia Vergara), a waitress and Eugene's crush who used to be the lover of a very bad man. Lacking both the resources and skills of an Ocean's Eleven, the Knights make do the best they can -- a disposable camera inside a trucker hat serves as surveillance equipment, and the group's intern (the endearingly dorky Josh Grisetti) alerts his colleagues to trouble by singing "This Little Light of Mine."

It's also the kind of show that rewards attentive viewing with some great throwaway lines (provided largely by Kevin Michael Richardson, who has one of the best voices on TV, and Maz Jobrani) and visual jokes, like the crew's slo-mo walk in their matching bargain-bin shirts. (It also has what may instantly be TV's greatest current theme song, courtesy of Late Show music director Paul Shaffer.)

Logue is essentially playing the straight man/dreamer here, but it's a part that suits his everydude appearance, and creators Rob Burnett and Jon Beckerman (Ed) also let him indulge in some off-the-wall antics of his own, as Eugene fancies himself a master of assumed identities.

Knights doesn't sustain its lunacy as well as, say, The Office or Scrubs do, and I shudder to think what might happen to it when American Idol kicks in later this month. But it's easily the funniest half-hour ABC has mounted since The Job a few seasons back.

In Case of Emergency, which airs at 9:30 p.m., goes for the same kind of sideways humor as Knights, but it doesn't hit the mark. Its setup is similar to that of another freshman show, CBS' The Class, in that it reunites several former classmates under deeply imperfect circumstances and then spins from there.

The setup is a little more believable here in that at least two of the four principals -- Harry Kennison (Jonathan Silverman) and Jason Ventress (David Arquette) -- are still friends, and Harry knows a third, diet guru Sherman Yablonsky (Greg Germann), well enough to be Sherman's phone call when he lands in jail after hijacking a pastry truck. And all three guys have fond memories of Kelly Lee (Kelly Hu), the beautiful valedictorian of their class, who's now working at a massage parlor.

The show never quite finds its groove in the first two episodes, though. It's a single-camera, no-laugh-track production, but a number of lines feel like they were written in anticipation of yuks from a studio audience. Hu seems to handle the odd pacing the best, despite (or perhaps because of) her relative lack of sitcom experience compared to her co-stars.

All four of the ex-classmates have pretty legitimate regrets about the way their lives have turned out. I'm sure a lot of people can relate to that idea; it's doubtful, though, that they'd find it all that funny.