Manhattan Love Story

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.