The Class

I one was of many people who really liked the show Joan of Arcadia, which was canceled a year or two ago. I also really liked Jason Ritter in his role as Joan's brother. So I was pleased to see he was going to be in a new show this fall, even if it was a sitcom (to me he seems better suited for drama).

When I read more about the show, I thought it was a quirky idea, but maybe it would work out: just a way to get a group of same-age people together and have a 2006-style Friends. But when I tuned in to watch the first show, I was disappointed and kind of uncomfortable.

I'd read interviews with Jason Ritter about the show and his father's history as a sitcom star, and people said that they were taking care to present Jason as his own kind of comedic actor, not at all like his father. I don't see that they should have worried. You can't really tell how Jason Ritter works comedy, because this show isn't funny. What is immediately clear that he fit into Joan of Arcadia much better than this.

One person who does seem natural in the show is that chick from Mean Girls, the artsy girl inexplicably named Janis Ian (Lizzy Caplan). She's moody and sniping, bitter and cynical. Unfortunately all she can do is sit, stand, or walk there and be that, because there's no show around her.

Here's the idea: a guy (Jason Ritter) is going to propose to his girlfriend on the anniversary of the day they met---at a party where he's gathered people from their third-grade class, because that's where the meeting occurred. So these people are supposed to be 29-30. They don't seem like it. Well, not all of them. Jason Ritter seems about 26. Of course, he's still a successful doctor. [cough, cough] His predictable love interest to be, gloomy gal, just played a highschooler in Mean Girls, so you do the visual math. The chick from Joey looks around 35. Speaking of Joey, this show's requisite lunkhead character, who lives with his overly stereotyped mom (is this vaudeville?) seems maybe 24. The stepsister from Ella Enchanted, Lucy Punch, looks like she's in her early 30s, I guess. Another character, who oh-so-humorously tries to commit suicide twice in as many episodes, seems about 30 also. 30 with a bullet! Ah ha ha ha ha. Ha. But no, he takes pills.

Yes yes, that's right, suicide! You could see by my hilarious joke there what a fertile farmland of laughs that is! And the rest of the show is more of the similar. What we have here is a laugh track running behind people dealing with disappointment and pain. They're a bunch of people who, we see, all have failed in one or more areas in life. And instead of seriously examining why a large group from this third grade class turned out the way they did, we are supposed to find their shortcomings and very real problems funny. The guy who organizes the whole anniversary/proposal party is brutally dumped right then. What a laugh! The woman who dated the closeted gay boy in high school is oblivious that she's now married to and has a child with a flaming homosexual. Chuckle after chuckle! I guess this is really supposed to be funny. Instead, it's perverse.

The laugh track disagrees. Then again, the laugh track apparently thinks the funniest thing in the show is the entry of a child named Oprah. I may be wrong, but with the popularity of Oprah, I wouldn't think a child with her name was a joke all by itself. The laugh track also "ooo"s and whistles when characters we just met and don't give a damn about kiss. This is how you know the laugh track is not human.
A human would not be moved by one-note paperdoll characters. A human would not laugh at this show, and since it's a sitcom made for humans to watch, I'd say that was a bad sign.


The only characters you have any connection to by the end of the first two episodes are Lina the sweet girl and Richie the suicidal guy. The others fade into who cares. Ethan (Jason Ritter's character) is too busy being alternately a stilted and weird version of sad---at one point, he is supposedly depressed, lying on a bed, but looks as though he's balancing carefully so as not to fall off---and pseudohumorously caring. Kat (Lizzy Caplan's sulky gal) is just a smart-alecky and impulsive bystander. Then we have the couple that was thrown in for no real reason except to have a stupid guy and sex on the first episode; and the aforementioned gay/oblivious/Oprah mess.

So let's say you are interested in the sweet/suicidal romance. The problem with that is if the guy really is suicidal, they can't continue to make a joke out of it. And even if recent events have made him not so suicidal, he'll have to face the fact he was suicidal. They can't really ignore the fact that he was. But since this is TV, maybe they will ignore it. Or maybe they'll keep it as a running joke. After all, the laugh track finds it hilarious.