Every now and then along comes a new TV series that is so disagreeable and off-putting that it beggars fair description.
Mr. Sunshine (CTV, 8 p.m.; ABC, Wednesdays, 9:30 p.m.) is just such a show. You can hardly be unaware of it. Its star and co-creator, Canadian-reared actor Matthew Perry, formerly of Friends, has been all over the place talking about it. He's been interviewed by many journalists and appeared on numerous talk shows to promote it.
If you've seen the promotion you might get the impression that Mr. Sunshine is a comedy about a 40-year old guy who is a jerk and decides he'd rather be nice to people and generally a better person. Indeed that is the premise, but in execution the show is a sad waste of everyone's talent, including that of Perry, such as it is.
Only in L.A. and only among rich narcissists could Mr. Sunshine be concocted and construed as anything approaching comedy. It has the sourness of cynical contrivance and the feebleness of material created more out of therapy than genuine life experience. It is, heaven help us, an attack on selfishness that reeks of self-indulgence. It is supposed to be about the humanizing of a creep but doesn't appear to be the creation of human beings.
The first episode tonight - lightened a little from the pilot shown to critics last year - introduces us to Ben (Perry), the manager of Sunshine Arena, a venue somewhere in California, one assumes. Ben is turning 40 and, as we are told ceaselessly, a squall of sudden self-knowledge has informed him that his life is empty. He's always been interested only in himself. Oh, he has an on/off, sort-of girlfriend named Alice (the wonderful Andrea Anders, from Better Off Ted), the arena's marketing director. That's crumbling, though, because Alice is interested in another arena employee, Alonzo (James Lesure), who is kind, generous and happy on a permanent basis.
As odious as Ben is, he's not quite as kookily self-centred as his boss, Crystal (Alison Janney), who is a monster of insensitivity. But she's still the boss. She wants Ben to take care of her estranged son, Ben (Nate Torrence), a roly-poly guy who seems dim and childlike but is a savant of sorts.
Hilarity does not ensue. What ensues is overemphasis on Ben's journey to being a better person. As if this was of some inherent interest to the audience. It would be, if Ben's selfishness were treated as something to be mocked, but that isn't the case. We are meant to empathize, to see Ben as a regular guy, like any other jerk. A jerk with a heart of gold. He embodies that ancient and irritating TV cliché: Crusty but lovable. Only this is on a truly grand scale.
Mr. Sunshine is a workplace comedy overloaded with awkward-moment comedy bits. There's no laugh track, which is a drawback in this instance because you remain unsure if anybody is in truth supposed to find the material funny. It looks like a show put together from a kit. In the first two episodes we see elements of dozens of banal TV sitcoms. Nothing seems to have come organically from a writer's intuitive sense of fun or satire.
A problem is the fact that Matthew Perry has admitted to injecting something of himself into Mr. Sunshine. Apart, that is, from being a co-creator and writer on the show. Talking to TV critics to promote the series, he said, "I spent a great deal of my 20s and the bulk of my 30s sort of a little self-obsessed. And it was in changing that in my own life that I thought that would make an interesting character."
While we all support the transcendence of selfishness in others, it is rather a different matter when a significantly wealthy and successful TV star uses the journey to being nicer as a model for a TV show. We are witness to therapy, and witnessing therapy is not entertainment. Isn't it yet another act of selfishness and narcissism to impose your struggle to be nice on the general public?
There's a point in the show where Ben says to Alice, "I can't pretend to listen to your problems right now. We have to talk about me." And much of the audience might respond, "I can't pretend to be interested in your journey to being nice. It's all about you, and you are not funny or interesting." Or course, that could just be me.
Check local listings.