Manhattan Love Story

The pilot, which debuts Tuesday and introduces Dana (Analeigh Tipton) a serial monogamist and Peter (Jake McDorman, “Greek”) as a serial dater, is full of antiquated cliches better suited for a romantic comedy from 30 years ago.... If viewers stick around for the second episode, which airs next week, they will grow to like the show and the oddball way this unlikely pair start down the road to romance.

Manhattan Love Story suggests some thoughts are better left unsaid.

The performances are relatively charming. ... But the script is so crammed with musty gender stereotypes and familiar dating tropes that everyone onscreen gets sucked into mediocrity.

Manhattan Love Story (ABC) makes the male lead feel almost irrelevant. He's not essential to the fantasy.

While a nice romantic comedy is a good escape, this one uses too many romantic cliches a little too late.

It's one of the more annoying pilots of the season, thanks to the show's premise, which insists that we hear the otherwise unexpressed thoughts of Dana (Analeigh Tipton) and Peter (Jake McDorman) as they meet not-so-cute and not so interestingly. A second episode was less annoying and intermittently charming, partly because of the ensemble.

The worst that can be said for Manhattan Love Story is that it's bland.

The show appears to have put too much faith in its gimmick, and too much weight, at least initially, on the shoulders of its leads.

Tipton is the big reason we might keep watching. The voice-over self-narration is annoying and a poor substitute, as usual, for dramatizing the story.

In introducing the inner monologues, it’s as if creator Jeff Lowell and his team sought to maximize the show’s joke-telling space, but what they’re actually doing is restricting performance. Whenever the voice-over resurfaces, Tipton and/or McDorman are forced to pull faces or seek another form of silent expression. Shooting for the pilot must have looked like a high-price game of charades.

The dialogue and interior monologues occasionally have some snap. But Manhattan Love Story mostly is pretty thin soup in a city known for its delis. Seconds are not recommended.

There might be something smartly contemporary buried deep inside Manhattan Love Story, but the pilot is too busy demonstrating its cognizance of connected devices and social media.

All of this occurs against the backdrop of the make-believe New York of the mind and is aimed mainly at simple folk who understand romance only through the broad strokes of gender stereotypes. They’re both adorable enough that you’ll feel just the slightest twinge of remorse as you kick them to the curb.

One wants to like the show on Tipton's behalf, but there is no real spark between her and designated future boyfriend Peter (Jake McDorman). And Peter's own thoughts show him to be kind of a jerk — more of a jerk, I imagine, than we are meant to think him.

The lead characters for whom we're supposed to root in Manhattan Love Story feel as slapped together as people stranded at a speed-dating event.

For most of the first two episodes, Tipton ... seems like a prisoner of the crummy show around her, while "Greek" alum McDorman has a character no actor could make likable.

In addition to being nowhere near as adorable as it thinks it is, Manhattan Love Story is also structurally off. The show relies very heavily on Peter and Dana's voice-overs, which is a real mistake.

Manhattan Love Story is simply an unfunny study in tired male/female stereotypes.

Its two love-crossed leads are a pair of characters that the audience, at least after two episodes, will have no interest in seeing get together.... The script here is a constant barrage of inner monologue turned narration, most of it centered on how love and life is different in the Big Apple, without ever making that key element of the show feel genuine.

Five minutes of their witless, charmless, inane babbling, and what you'll be thinking is likely to be unprintable in a family publication.

It’s sexist and stupid and shows no signs of potential, other than becoming more sexist, stupid and annoying as the weeks roll by.

This annoying show is not quite as drenched in dumb and/or sexist assumptions as "Mixology," but that is the lowest possible bar to clear.