5 Fall TV Shows That Are Doomed To Fail
4. Me, Myself And I
When the best part about your show is that it has Urkel in a minor role, well, you, yourself and the other I’s who greenlit this gimmicky comedy, are in trouble.
Saturday Night Live alum Bobby Moynihan plays entrepreneur/inventor Alex Riley in the present day, and it also flashes back to when he was 14 (played by It’s Jack Dylan Grazer), and flashes forward to when he is 65 (played by John Laroquette).
While time-shifting shows can work, it is a stretch to believe that Moynihan, best known for playing ‘Drunk Uncle’ on SNL, has sobered up, hit the gym, and become as dashing as Dan from Night Court.
Creator Dan Kopelman, who wrote Malcolm In The Middle, sets the kids scenes in the 90’s, Moynihan’s middle-aged scenes in 2017, and the future scenes in the most generic and boring depiction of the future a TV production budget would allow. The show deserves kudos for attempting to weave a different kind of structure to a traditional TV comedy, yet they also use tired plot devices like introducing the teenaged love interest with slo-motion over music, or the cliché of finding your wife in bed with another man.
The message here is that things that happen in your past, have an impact on your later life, but that shouldn't take three generations, or a whole series of television, to explain. And after losing almost 30% of its lead-in (Kevin Can Wait) for its recent premiere, viewers appear to agree.