- Network: CBS
- Series Premiere Date: Mar 31, 2014
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Critic Reviews
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If even a few good performances lock into your vision, you perk up. In this new comedy about friends in various stages of relationship envy and regret, there are two: James Van Der Beek and Zoe Lister-Jones. [7 Apr 2014, p.45]
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The cast feels solid, and likable, jelling swiftly.... Then comes that final distasteful sex gag. Let's pray it's just pilot-itis.
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Friends With Better Lives seems to be betting that we, like the characters themselves, won’t need much beyond each other. That could work. Especially if they tell an occasional joke that’s not about sex.
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It’s amiably crude and fairly funny, too, but the show will leave some viewers clutching their pearls with jokes tied to masturbation, testicles, defecation, the scent of private parts and oral sex--all in its first episode.
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After respectively stealing scenes on a very good single-camera sitcom and a mediocre live-audience one, both actors [James Van Der Beek and Zoe Lister Jones] come ready to play in the ensemble setup, and that’ll be a huge factor in Friends With Better Lives’ ability to improve on a so-so pilot.
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If you like your comedy slathered in crude, this sitcom is catnip. Everyone else will wonder if CBS stopped making shows with recognizable human beings when “Everybody Loves Raymond” went off the air.
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There is a professional, even a grim efficiency to the jokes.... There are breast jokes, genital jokes, a long oral sex joke, an alcoholic-sorority-girl-defecating-in-a-closet joke. A few hit, many miss.
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It's about several friends at various relationship stages--long married, single and looking, single and finding, on the verge of divorcing--who envy each other for reasons that will probably elude most viewers because the characters are too self-involved and uninteresting.
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It has exactly three things going for it: Zoe Lister-Jones, Rick Donald, and the assumption that their next respective projects will be more entertaining than this. [18/25 Apr 2014, p.102]
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The pilot is rough, with much of the humor dealing with sex and male genitalia, which seems like something you would find in a Seth McFarlane show.
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For now it’s pretty much something you wouldn’t wish on your best friends.
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Despite the attractive cast, these “Friends” are a mostly nondescript bunch, so much so it wouldn’t be a shock to find that those who initially tune in after the “How I Met Your Mother” finale ultimately decide that this life experience is best left as a one-night stand.
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Better Lives lacks the ensemble chemistry and clever writing of “HIMYM,” and seems content to rely on a non-stop barrage of sophomoric sex jokes and double entendres.
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One thing I'll say for these friends: They could all use better writing.
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The humor is decidedly caustic and surprisingly smutty. This might work as a cable comedy, where they could be explicit. On a network, it just seems insolently self-satisfied.
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Friends With Better Lives isn’t better than that show or any other half-hour comedy that’s come along in the past five years or so.
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Friends With Better Lives is just one witless, thudding, sex-obsessed crack after another.
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[A] wretched new sitcom.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 27 out of 45
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Mixed: 5 out of 45
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Negative: 13 out of 45
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May 15, 2014
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Apr 23, 2014
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Apr 14, 2014