2 Broke Girls - 1x01 - Pilot

Huh. Potential. Surprisingly a lot of potential.  Or, maybe, just surprising it has potential. Those posters and ads made it look like two parts Odd Couple, one part Tragically Late Paris Hilton Parody.  I was ready to completely ignore another three-camera laugh track sitcom based on a tired premise, when a commercial during the HIMYM permiere was kind enough to point out Kat Dennings was in it. Luckily, I'm always in a Kat Dennings mood, so, after accomplishing the Herculean task of not reaching over twelve inches to my left and lightly nudging the remote, I found myself the surprised recipient of an oddly satisfying episode.

I'd follow that smile through a Real Housewives episode if I had to.
(source: Imagery by Pete)

The plot is surprisingly light when summarized: Kat plays Max, a long-suffering waitress at a crappy hole-in-the-wall in Williamsburg. She gets almost no help from the apparently long-parade of second-waitresses who've been hired by clueless owner/manager Bryce Lee. After the latest disaster turns out to be turning tricks for the Russian mob in the stock room, Bryce hires a Paris Hilton look-alike (I say that, but it's really only just barely. But it's obvious her hairstyle and slight frame are meant to evoke the useless heiress), who immediately gets on Max's nerves. Caroline is apparently the daughter of Bernie Madoff Martin Channing, and has had her accounts frozen so cold, she actually needs to WORK for a living. She's homeless and clueless in the ways of the world, but Max takes pity on her, and even lets her crash on her couch. After Max's creepy douchey apparently-good-looking-if-you-ladies-like-that-chiseled-chest-look-hrmph live-in boyfriend puts the moves on Caroline (and then beds someone else in Max's bed after being turned down), Max kicks his ass to the curb, invites Caroline to move in, and here we start the exciting adventure of two single girls in New York with nothing but a dream trying to have it all eek out a borderline poverty wage in rapidly-hipstering-Williamsburg.

Why I liked:

First, most of the jokes were surprisingly good. Again, maybe its because my expectations were geared towards generic laugh-track sitcom blandness, but I found myself actually impressed at a lot of them. Not all of them, by any stretch. But there were enough, that even though the punchlines were obvious, tended to be delivered with a modicum of restraint, and a desire to find the less obvious route to the punchline.

The marrying the ketchup joke, for instance, turned out subtler than i was expecting. You weren't hit over the head with it by like...declaring the bottles "Catsup and Wife" or something. It also risked running into the ground with the inevitable "okay, now divorce the ketchups" joke, but somehow it managed to underline the humor, instead of diagram it. A deft touch. The subway boob touching lesboeroticism was wholly unexpected, not telegraphed, and allowed to breathe on it's own instead of being mugged to death.

Of course, then you have the horribly, utterly, war-crime level lines like “It turns out Chesty Kournikova was Vladimir Putin It Out!" (Where do you even begin with something like that? Who read that and said that should go on television? Has the person responsible been taken out back and shot?)

A lot of the funnier punchlines went farther than I assumed they would. Raunchy and dirty enough to seem like real conversations you'd have with your friends (or at least assholes who annoy you), and yet never hit that "this just seems cheap and lazy" threshold that Two and Half Men would often hit. Which is weird, considering less than a minute into the cold open, we're treated to impressively loud sex screams from another room. You'd think that'd be cheap. Somehow, not so much. Can't put my finger on it. It's cheap, but it's..it's not childish about it. It's not sniggering at it's own dirty thoughts.

On the non-humor side, surprising high point was the awkward post-first-day interaction outside the diner. It was a little moment that really rung true, one we all have hundreds of times in our lives, but is rarely ever acknowledged in the short-form that's sitcom. Unfortunately I fear that's one of those subtle details that will get lost as the show moves forward into proper production episodes (see HIMYM).

Points for the surprisingly not-as-awkward-as-it-could've-been introduction to the overarching plot of raising $250k. Liked the money counter at the end. Hopefully that sticks around.

It wasn't without it's awkward pilot moments, naturally. The most notable of which included: the set up and allusions to the old counter dude (who I had to IMDb to remember he was Martin's boss on MARTIN), the PAINFUL allusion/explanation of the Bernie Madoff expy, and Kat/Max's tear down of the annoying knit-hat wearing hipster doofuses. While satisfying on its own, it smacked of Pilot-Writer-Inserting-Clever-Rant-He's-Been-Dying-To-Get-Off-His-Chest Syndrome (see Jerry's "Little Bit Dry" speech in The Seinfeld Chronicles, that similarly screeched the action to a halt).

Paradoxically enough, a lot of the funniest lines in the episode, also came out strained and awkward enough to end up on the Cons list as well. Max telling one of the hipster doofuses that his annoying finger snapping "is the sound that dries up [her] vagina" is awesome, but also suffers from a strained, unnatural delivery. It's not uncommon to see that in pilot episodes, but it's especially obvious during Max's big dramatic speeches.

I also can't help but wonder if Earl's horrendous Putin Pun (and his equally facepalmy "That girl's working harder than Stephen Hawking putting on cuff links"), was meant for a more self-aware delivery. It might've worked better coming from someone being purposefully cheesy and unfunny (for some reason Marshall from HIMYM comes to mind). That said, I really hope they don't get rid of Earl. I like that actor. Just stop giving him such horrible lines.

Speaking of missteps, I'm not sure I quite buy the character of the socialite mother Max babysits for. While a lot of the characters that inhabit the diner definately fall on the "wacky sitcom" side of the realism spectrum, a caricature that extreme seems out of place and almost mean spirited. It's impossible to believe she actually went to the trouble of giving birth, or even gestating fetuses (fetii?) in her body for 9 months. It definitely seemed more of a case of "what else can we do to stick it to the man, NYC style? Ooh I know, the Nanny Diaries!".

Overall though, this show has lots of good potential. I'd give it half a season to prove itself, fully expecting it will earn a full first and second season on top of that.

It's main problem is how it looks to the outside world: like the same schmaltzy wacky-roomate sitcom that's been done two dozen times over, this time with a Paris Hilton clone. I came THIS close to passing it over, and I would've been very disappointed. Luckily the tragedy of Traffic Light has made me make sure I give as many new shows a chance this year as I can. TPTB need to slap this episode online, free, in as many places as it can. The fact that it's not on Hulu is criminal. Also, split up the best jokes into clips and spread those around too (protip: the knit-hat-wearing-hipsters out would not qualify). Unfortunately I can't think of a way to fix the damn poster issue. Not many ways to you can redo that without it looking the same.

In the end though, I really liked it, and I'm looking forward to more.