Always beware of (usually professional) television reviews that pretentiously trumpet the theme: "this has been done before." Regardless of the content of any show--guess what?--it has been done before. Any sophomore in college studying any genre or era of literature can assure you: it's all been done before. A lack of pure originality is never the right criteria for a TV program,Always beware of (usually professional) television reviews that pretentiously trumpet the theme: "this has been done before." Regardless of the content of any show--guess what?--it has been done before. Any sophomore in college studying any genre or era of literature can assure you: it's all been done before. A lack of pure originality is never the right criteria for a TV program, especially in the present era of massively excessive programming content. Rather than measure a program by some subjective sense of originality, television shows should be measured on how well they re-visit and improve their generic and stylistic predecessors. If they succeed in that way, they demand our attention.
I'm Sorry demands our attention.
On that score, "I'm Sorry" is a delightful addition to the linage of situation comedies about modern family life, the intersection of a comic and comedy writer to the "real world", and the assent of a woman protagonist into the current of contemporary culture and cultural sensitivity. It succeeds on three levels.
First, I'm Sorry is undeniably funny. Anyone familiar with the work of star/creator/writer Andrea Savage will recognize her provocative humor. Savage is funny, a truism evident from her turns on Funny-or-Die, Dog Bites Man, Hotwives, and Veep. But where her heightened comic sensibilities, particularly on FOD, Dog Bites Man and Hotwives, can quickly become monotone and tiresome, her performance on I'm Sorry stays fresh and anticipatory. Each scene crackles with her irreverent and pleasant, though often, profane take on her friends and family and the events of their suburban lives. And where her comic voice remains fairly steady and constant, her biting sarcasm and mocking tone is ripe for this setting: a modern middle-aged wife and parent who occupies every scene of the show and is the sole point of view of each plot line, and whose reflective and reflexive voice defines every episode. Savage has always had great comedic harmony; in I'm Sorry, she has found a setting that gives her the pitch-perfect underlying melody.
Second, I'm Sorry wonderfully re-calibrates the underlying scaffolding of a longline of shows that succeed from the same premises: I Love Lucy, Family Ties, Full House, Modern Family (of the genre of family-life sitcoms), Curb Your Enthusiasm, Seinfeld, Everybody Loves Raymond (of the comic-in-the-real-world genre), and That Girl, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, 30 Rock, Park and Recreation (of the female lead in a sitcom genre). I'm Sorry plows new soil in the well-trodden field of each of these successful lines, and ties each of them together in a way that simultaneously is both comfortingly reliable and refreshingly new. The debt it owes, especially to Enthusiasm ("open-mouth-insert-foot"), Lucy (irreverent wife and mother), and 30 Rock (female comedy writer out in the world), is self-evident. But the way it converges and enhances the memory of its progenitors is both overdue and invigorating.
Finally, I'm Sorry uniquely blends the two age-old equalities of good situation comedies in a formula that is adroit. It is funny in a way that mirrors so much of the best modern television comic programming: irreverent, occasionally profane, and female-empowering (with additional space I could cite numerous examples of hilarity from the show in which a smart, funny woman is permitted to plum her own feelings and ideas about sex, modern famial relationships, and a loving marriage). And yet it is also occasionally, but never too much so--never mawkishly--sprinkled with sentimentality and touching emotion. Savage's character is funny, occasionally ruthlessly so, but also deeply attached to her family, her marriage, and her gender in a way that is liberating and enchanting. Savage plays a character who we would all like to know as friend, neighbor, spouse, and parent.
This show deserves your attention because of how it does everything well as it resets its incorporating genres in new and better ways.… Expand
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