- Network: FX
- Series Premiere Date: Aug 4, 2014
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Critic Reviews
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The joy here is watching Grammer and Lawrence trade barbs (and there are a bunch of them).
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Partners has its share of clunkers, but Lawrence and Grammer retain their comedic timing while also pairing up nicely.
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While Jackson will feel some genuine hesitation and wariness about Grammer's pit-bull personality, it doesn’t feel yet like the chemistry between the actors has fully developed.
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The Partners are well matched, but they deserve better material.
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Grammer throws himself into the material, but Lawrence seems deflated. Perhaps he recognizes these scripts seem like somebody’s first drafts. Partners doesn’t make much of a case.
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Kelsey Grammer gives his pompous-windbag act another whirl, this time opposite Martin Lawrence on the predictably old-school comedy Partners.
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The standard-sitcom format of Partners, with its forced laugh track and cookie-cutter supporting players--Alan’s spoiled step-daughter (McKaley Miller), Marcus’ bow-tie-wearing gay paralegal (Rory O’Malley)--makes it difficult to really invest too much time in the Partners premise.
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There is great chemistry between old pros Lawrence and Grammer, even if the scripts are spotty and feel about 20 years old, same-sex marriage references notwithstanding.
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It's funny at times, as it would almost have to be. But it's more often vexing, like an out-of-tune guitar.
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Partners is your basic odd couple comedy with Mr. Grammer attacking his part with his trademark zeal and Mr. Lawrence wandering through the motions in somnambulant fashion. It’s a stark energy contrast but a secondary problem for Partners, which mostly stumbles on predictable plotting that flows from pedestrian writing.
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The goal of establishing them as a mismatched pair in the pilot (written and run by sitcom veterans Robert L. Boyett and Robert Horn), as well as a subsequent episode, proves stale and weakly defined from the get-go.
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It’s an opposites-attract dynamic, something Mr. Grammer should be familiar with from Frasier, but it fails to click, at least in the first two episodes.
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Some of the jokes are criminally bad, the supporting characters are tired tropes, and Lawrence seems to be dialing it in.
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Partners is bad even by most lawyer-joke standards, and the writing's falseness and laziness carries over to the performances.
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Get past the genuine awfulness of this--and it is awful--and a strange melancholy begins to settle in.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 7 out of 20
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Mixed: 4 out of 20
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Negative: 9 out of 20
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Aug 12, 2014
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Aug 6, 2014
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Aug 23, 2014