Worst Week
Thursday, November 27th, 2008Obviously the writer’s strike has taken a toll on things this season. New shows have been hard to come by, and good shows at that… I can only name one. It is an American remake of a British sitcom The Worst Week of My Life. It is about a guy, to whom an inordinate number of bad things happen, and through association, his fianceé and her parents are dragged into the bad things as well.
It is an interesting exercise in television writing as they start out each episode with a barely-there status quo where everybody has had enough time to cool down from the last horrible incident (normally shown in a short clip) and quickly builds motivation upon mishap upon excuse to bend the story toward a relatively believable yet insane ending. It is fairly predictable in the short term (something important is introduced and almost assuredly going to go wrong) but you swiftly end up far from where you could have imagined it going in the beginning of the episode. You definitely would not want to hear about an ending out of context but it would probably make you wonder how they got to that destination.
The acting is uniformly top-notch, especially last week’s episode with Fred Willard on it. Comic genius that guy, he was also recently on Pushing Daisies (a great new show from last year if you even remember it). And for those out there that think women just aren’t as funny as men, I’ve got news for you: Erinn Hayes is an incredible comic actress. I’m willing to see anything she’s in thanks to this show. Additional proof of her awesomeness here: Children’s Hospital, the Rob Corddry web series.
Worst Week is on Mondays at 9:30 ET on CBS, and a great companion to How I Met Your Mother at 8:30, although I would skip all two and a half of the men between the two.