TV Review: 'Worst Week'

CBS' Worst Week, which premieres on Monday (Sept. 22), may be the finest new network comedy of the fall. And yes, that's certainly damning Worst Week with faint praise.

The competition for comedy glory this fall is hardly fierce. FOX has already premiered the leaden Do Not Disturb to exactly the sort of dismal ratings it deserves. CBS will premiere the charmless Gary Unmarried later this week. And NBC's Kath & Kim has already undergone sufficient creative turmoil that its first set of screeners only arrived on my desk this morning, which probably explains its wildly uneven (but sometimes promising) tone.

That leaves Worst Week, an American take on The Worst Week of My Life, a chaotic and sometimes exhausting single-camera comedy that CBS has inexplicably wedged into a Monday lineup dominated by relatively traditional multi-camera sitcoms. With its absence of laugh-track (or studio audience) or familiar punchlines, Worst Week may be a tough match with its Two and a Half Men lead-in, but the new comedy is as frantic and eager-to-please as a young puppy and every bit as sheepishly unashamed of its transgressions.

Sam (Kyle Bornheimer) and Melanie (Erinn Hayes) have been dating for two years, but due to at least one unfortunate occurrence, her parents (Kurtwood Smith and Nancy Lenehan) still disapprove. Sam and Melanie plan to use an upcoming week with her parents to break the news of both their engagement and her pregnancy, but if Sam thought things were uncomfortable before, everything's about to get worse.

The tag line for Worst Week -- "Good guy. Bad luck." -- pretty much says it all. As played by Bornheimer, Sam is a totally likeable Average Joe, a little Patrick Warburton and a little Richard Kind. He's a bit awkward and a bit geeky, but his heart is in the right place. Good intentions, though, mean nothing when you're a walking illustration of Murphy's Law.

In its pilot, developed for CBS by Matt Tarses, Sam goes through an ever-escalating series of misadventures, think Meet the Parents blended with Martin Scorsese's After Hours. Sam gets puked on and maced, urinates on his future father-in-law's birthday goose, starts a fire, crashes a car and... well... I could go on, but that would spoil things.

In fact, in roughly 22 minutes, Worst Week pushes Sam's discomfort to a level that may alienate some viewers and certainly raises the question of how, exactly, anybody plans to maintain the pacing and humiliation in a second episode, much less in 13, much less in a potentially long series run. And while there may be shows capable of making this level of mayhem look easy, the disastrous domino effect in Worst Week is often a labored assortment of pratfalls emotional whoopee cushions. I kind of hope Sam gets a break in upcoming episodes, not necessarily because he deserves it, but because the writers might benefit from added calm.

Do you root for Sam? No, but Bornheimer keeps you from actively pitying him, which is probably the most that one could ask. The minute at which the character becomes a pathetic sad-sack would be the minute viewers turn away. The pilot hints at an appealing dynamic between Sam and Melanie, which will eventually ground the show, I hope. I've liked Hayes on both the short-lived The Winner and in unaired episodes of Kitchen Confidential and she's capable of more than just being a cute good sport, which is all that's been asked of her thus far.

Could Smith and Lenehan play the stern, derisive father and the flighty WASP-y mom in their sleep? Probably. But Smith's withering scorn never got the respect it deserved on That '70s Show and he brings a slightly different shading here. Very slight. But it's there.

There were several tweaks made to Worst Week between the original pilot and the episode that will air on Monday, changing that help better establish the characters in the early going. Rewatching the episode, I expected for fatigue to overwhelm me, but I found myself laughing at some of the same things a second time. Could Worst Week go from "different" to "annoying" in no time flat? Absolutely, but for now I'm curious to see where it goes over the next couple weeks.

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