Hello Ladies

Fortunately, there are some laughs in Hello Ladies and skewerings of the vapidness that runs like a river beneath the glitzy surface of show business.

Hello Ladies is so much of a piece with both "The Office" and "Life's Too Short"--oblivious asshole keeps putting himself in humiliating situations because of an overinflated sense of self--that it's tiresome almost from the start.

Merchant uses his gangly physicality (at 6-foot-7, he towers over everyone else on the show) to good effect in scenes when Stuart is on the make. Despite that, though, and despite the fact that Merchant is willing to make himself the butt of the joke, Hello Ladies doesn't quite pull off the trick of making Stuart someone you want to spend week after week seeing.

Hello Ladies already seems well-worn by the end of Episode 2. Some of Merchant’s asides are amusing enough, but not to the point of caring one way or the other about what befalls his character.

Hello Ladies is a diverting curiosity, nice to look at and good for a few squirmy laughs.

We've seen this show before, in fresher settings, with stronger comic structure --from, in fact, the same creators: Merchant and American "Office" writers Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky.

As Stuart, the lovelorn web-designer hero of this sad-sack comedy vehicle, [Stephen Merchant] often tries one's patience, feeling more like an overexposed supporting player incapable of elevating the initial one-joke premise.

Despite clever and uncomfortable moments, Ladies falls short of the pay-TV plateau.

The odd episode of Hello Ladies has its moments, but it's difficult to imagine where the show can go. Merchant has painted himself into a corner with an unlikeable central character wandering through a shopworn stereotype of Los Angeles.

Future television and movie historians will know us mainly by our enjoyment of stories about sad sacks who further their own misery by trying to impress those around them. It’s a threadbare shtick, but Merchant... has mastered it.

The trouble is, cringe-worthy comedy is so overdone at this point that even people like Merchant, who can milk it like almost no one else, can’t make it entertaining anymore. Mostly, it’s just painful to endure.