Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll

Leary is perfectly cast as the middle-aged wastrel with a modicum of talent and an ego the size of the Trump Tower.... Much of the show can’t be quoted. Many of the jokes you can see coming at you from the Zakim Bridge. They’re still funny.

It promises to be quite a juggling act, with Leary as balls-out as ever in the early going of his latest daring enterprise.

Leary, one of the sharpest comic writers in television, has a feast on this stuff, lampooning the infirmities of his geezer characters even as he lashes out at the current rock generation with the fury of a scorned old hippie.

The songs aren’t all terrific, but like “Rescue Me” at its best, S&D&R&R succeeds both as wild, uncontrolled, absurdist comedy and touching, quiet personal drama.

The show’s salty-sweet themes of loyalty and redemption contrast nicely with the vile comedic speeches Leary has made a career out of delivering.

For those who appreciate a good joke about Bon Jovi's guitarist, or other arcane music trivia, Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll delivers. Those who enjoy Leary's particular talent for spitting out great dialogue like it tastes bad will also find this one easy to watch.

[Dinosaur-rock] cliches still pack a comedic punch because, well, they're just so outlandish and evocative. The key is to bring some fresh twists to them, and for the most part, Leary's bunch succeeds in doing so.

His targets and tone may occasionally come across as creaky or cranky. But the jokes and the sentiment seem honest, and the older-man howls may strike those who have tired of the media's incessant and insipid pandering to Millennials as a welcome change of pace.

Gillies is great when going toe to toe with Leary, and she can sing to boot. As for Leary, well, he’s playing himself again, and if you’re fan, you’ll love it, and if you’re not, you won’t.

Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll may not be easy to swallow, but it digests comfortably.

This one's helped considerably by the casting of Gillies--whose character, it turns out, actually can sing--and Corbett, who's as smooth as Leary is rough.

Still fun in fits and starts, the series begins with enough energy to help it coast along, abetted by rock cameos that provide an additional helping of street cred.

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll settles for a lot of broad comic situations, building off Johnny’s inability to function as a normal person. And yet the series has a certain scrappy charm, which is just as attributable to Leary as its faults.

The first five episodes of the series are somewhat hit and miss, but Leary fans who miss either his stand-up or hit show “Rescue Me,” should be satisfied, and I can easily see the program working out its writing kinks and getting stronger as the cast gels.

It lurches in tone and an accelerated narrative that seems at times to leave holes in the storytelling, gaps that draw you up short where you should be just be sailing along. Still, if it's a bit of a mess, it's not an uninteresting one.

A little of Leary goes a long way with me these days, but there are enough other elements here (the supporting cast also includes Bobby Kelly, John Ales and Elaine Hendrix as former Heathens reuniting to be part of the Gigi project) to potentially sample. But the father/daughter stuff is just too much.

The pluses of the show include watching Leary have a good time and seeing the way the cast gels around him.... Other TV series set in the music business--“Nashville,” “Empire”--have a lot more genre awareness and seem to make the characters’ enthusiasm believable enough. But on Sex&Drugs, even the costumes appear generic and unrealized.

Mr. Leary is trying to do something here that gets at the raunch and joy of the rock lifestyle but also offers a serious consideration of its consequences. He ends up not doing either very well.

S&D&R&R has several things going for it that make it passably enjoyable, including some funny dialogue, good performances and, of course, Leary’s trademark grumpy charm.

There’s potential here for a sharp sitcom about a man who’s kept aging but stopped growing. But too often Sex&Drugs shares Johnny’s arrested development, at the expense of both relevance and comedy.

With this vague sensibility and some outdated ideas about the music industry, Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll becomes the very thing Johnny claims to loathe most: It is inauthentic and forgettable.

Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll smells suspiciously like a vanity project that sat on Leary's shelf for a couple of decades.

As a music-industry story, Sex & Drugs is confused and outdated, with irritating, one-dimensional characters and self-consciously edgy humor. Like its protagonist, it’s mostly a sad relic straining to appear hip.

It’s a half-baked argument for the necessity of rock.

A warm family sitcom Sex&Drugs is not. Neither is it a very funny sitcom.

In the first few episodes, there are enough snappy lines and funny ideas to make me wish Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll was better. But the cringe-to-laugh ratio is too high for it to really sing.

It's the first heavily hyped new series of the year that could be described a total misfire.