I Love That for You

It’s not an easy thing to use your own terrifying experiences with mortality to feed the engines of comedy and pain, but Bayer is sharing that through Joanna and the authenticity of her experience makes all the difference in shaping character into a flawed human that we want to root for even when she’s done a very bad thing.

It’s a lot — a workplace sitcom, a satire of home shopping, a coming-of-age comedy, a pathos-filled portrait of lost soul, a rom-com (as Joanna develops a crush on coworker), and more. But it works for me, especially since the cast is so good.

Enjoy hearing the pitch. Bayer sells it with gusto. Shannon embraces it with heart. And Lewis kills it will excellence. Just when you thought you didn’t need another addictive series, “I Love That For You” steps in and tells you supplies are limited.

The show approaches these themes [what it means when companies commodify and exploit employees’ personal stories and Joanna’s stunted-by-childhood-cancer inner life] with a deft subtlety but it’s enough to ground it and make the cringe comedy more palatable.

Watching Joanna is like watching a bad improviser get picked from the crowd to go on stage with Second City, but Bayer knows exactly how to balance the go-for-it resilience of Joanna with her crippling uncertainty in the moment. It’s a real showcase for her.

While the show is no big deal, it handles the psychological and farcical ramifications of Joanna’s dilemma with a sensitivity that gives the sitcom setups an emotional kick you wouldn’t necessarily expect. Some of this has to do with Bayer’s performance — she nails Joanna’s blend of arrogance and abashment with an ace sketch comic’s facility.

Joanna, the lead character in Showtime’s I Love That For You, feels like an SNL bit tailor-made for Bayer—and that’s both the show’s strength and, potentially, its biggest shortcoming.

On paper, this Paramount+ sitcom is a tough sell. But, overall, it works. There might not be abundant belly laughs (though there are often great throwaway lines, such as assistant Darcy begging the CEO for time off to attend Graydon Carter’s barn warming on Martha’s Vineyard), but Bayer – on whose own story Joanna’s is based – keeps our sympathy throughout.

It feels a little predictable, but the extreme personas of the overdrawn characters keep you locked in.

[Bayer's] comedy chops here easily remind you of how she shined behind the Weekend Update desk with in-over-their-head characters such as Jacob the Bar Mitzvah Boy or flailing meteorologist Dawn Lazarus. ... The pilot, directed by Michael Showalter, has an even slower burn than say, Search Party, which he co-created.

I Love That For You makes for an incomplete and occasionally frustrating portrait of Joanna in the early episodes, but then so does Joanna’s own understanding of herself. With some patience and brutal self-honesty, it could yet evolve into something more.

Bayer is excellent at playing cartoonishly awkward, which made her a standout in the sketch-comedy confines of Saturday Night Live, but her cringey antics don't quite translate to episodic storytelling. Shannon salvages the underwritten Jackie.

By the third episode, I had come to the sad conclusion I didn’t want to spend much more time with these people. Not because they’re unlikable, as we’ve seen some great comedies through the years about folks who are mostly awful. (Hello, “Seinfeld.”) It’s because they’re not all that interesting.

Barely likable supporting characters and a tendency toward juvenile humor make the first two episodes a hard sell. But the show warms up enough in the third episode that we can envision it becoming an amiable workplace comedy, somewhere on the sweetness scale between “30 Rock” and “Ted Lasso.”