Mr. Mayor

Mr. Mayor has some very funny moments, and a growing chemistry among its ensemble. But it also has two ace stars in Danson and Hunter. We can’t wait to see how their characters’ relationship grows over the season.

“Mr. Mayor” is mostly a testament to the towering talent at the helm. Yes, the dialogue is filled with quippy pop culture jokes and the story structure is clear, clean, and inviting. Yes, the rest of the cast is strong, and Bobby Moynihan may have finally found the right supporting role for his particular talents. But Danson remains the draw among a show filled with draws. He earns your attention by adding a twist on a routine line or a fresh reaction to predictable events.

A kinder variant of Veep, and toothless as political satire, Mayor excels at zany offhand absurdities. [18-31 Jan 2021, p.10]

While the two episodes I previewed aren’t stellar (comedy pilots rarely are), they do offer a rare glimpse of hope for the endangered species that is the network sitcom.

Ted Danson has a way of classing up even a so-so premise, and so it is with "Mr. Mayor," a new sitcom from the "30 Rock" tandem of Robert Carlock and Tina Fey. Returning to NBC fresh off "The Good Place," the show allows its star to cut loose as L.A.'s unlikely new mayor, which is a pretty good place to start.

The mayor, who proudly declares himself “not a politician,” is befuddled by the paradoxical proprieties of current-day American politics, which are portrayed by the series with refreshing frankness. It took “Happy Days” five seasons to jump the shark; “Mr. Mayor” arguably does it in episode 2, with Bremer consuming some edibles at the ceremonial opening of L.A.’s “10,000th pot dispensary” (“Buy drugs!” he exhorts the crowd) and then careening from one public-relations calamity to another. The show has its charms, principally Mr. Danson, but his character will need some refining (only two episodes were available for review).

It’s neither risqué nor hugely original, but as lockdown hits have shown us, sometimes people want the pixelated equivalent of a warm blanket and a glass of milk.

On the basis of the two episodes available to review, “Mr. Mayor” is fine; given the talent on both sides of the camera, I expect it to get better. ... Danson has found his light and is waiting comfortably in it for the rest of the show to catch up. I can wait too.

Mr. Mayor lacks some edge. It’s less in the realm of Veep and more a hybrid of 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation. Which is not necessarily a bad thing! But you can feel Fey, Carlock, and the rest of the creative team still calibrating what sort of tone they want to strike. All that said, there are certainly some laughs in these first installments, and a lot of them come from Moynihan’s deadpan delivery.

With a collection of talent this impressive, on both sides of the camera, Mr. Mayor doesn’t have to worry about cancellation anytime soon. But, like Neil Bremer behind a podium, the show needs to figure out what it’s doing in this new office, and how to take advantage of its power.

It attempts to find comedy in our frustration—something Veep did better—but lacks the edge it needs to really bolster its take on wokeness. It rarely digs deeper than: Isn’t it fun to see Ted Danson driven to his wit’s end over these things?

The cast is good, with the ping-ponging of barbs between Danson and Hunter — network-styled, not “Veep”-styled — particularly enjoyable. ... But there is no cohesion, no clear target, no sense of what exactly this show is aiming for — yet. Fey and Carlock’s trademark brutal humor is there, but it seems randomly deployed.

[Two episodes are] a very small sample, but it’s what we have, and it’s a jarringly flat 42 minutes of television. No blame goes to Danson, who strides through the role of Neil Bremer, the newly elected and largely unqualified mayor of Los Angeles, with his typical aplomb.

By the second episode, Mr. Mayor is already resorting to bad toupee jokes and the aforementioned “PPPORN” debacle. (Really, no one at City Hall raised a red flag about that one?) Even a sure-fire winner like getting Ted Danson stoned on weed gummy bears somehow falls flat. (He ends up fighting a hockey mascot, for some reason.) The actors seem almost resigned here, too.

Danson does a bit of the goofiness we saw to better effect in “The Good Place” and Hunter is so stern it’s surprising someone didn’t pull her aside and point out this is a comedy. Stray bits of information (like a straw ban in Los Angeles) bring a smile; direct steals (how to spell “syzygy” was a plot point in “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee”) suggest someone didn’t do due diligence.

While there are glimmers of something more substantial and engaging beneath the surface—more on those below—the series does little to distinguish itself in these first two episodes.

Ted Danson is a long way from the Good Place in NBC's Mr. Mayor, but he plays a man who has definitely failed up. In his career. Not, unfortunately, in the quality of the show.

There’s little here we haven’t seen Danson do before and there’s more fun to be had from watching an unusually playful Hunter, a perfect match for the Fey/Carlock style of joke delivery, and Moynihan, who lands some of the biggest laughs. But the biggest laughs aren’t quite big enough, and while the watered-down 30 Rock formula might be preferable to some of the other heinously unfunny network sitcoms out there, it mostly serves as a depressing reminder of what came before.

It’s aiming at exposing hypocrisy, but ends up snidely nihilistic. The series is free-wheeling, almost alarmingly so, with its ultra-contemporary iconoclasm, but the zingers rarely land. The show is grumpy rather than irreverent, cranky instead of astutely sharp. ... Fey and Carlock’s house style doesn’t work so well when their characters have actual agency; it turns their narcissist fluster into real threat. What works best on Mr. Mayor is the goofier stuff, more timeless and less pointed gags amiably carried off by a game cast.

Mr. Mayor looks and feels shockingly generic. But even Carlock and Fey’s frenzied comic pacing disappeared by the deflatingly plotted second installment.

Wan, worn, predictable, "Mr. Mayor" feels like a misfire in the early episodes.