The Ranch

What it wants to be is a surprisingly effective collection of one-act plays that are sprinkled with laughs but mostly dramatic in nature. What it is is an occasionally effective (but always daring) sitcom, filmed before a live studio audience and packed with smutty jokes.

It takes characters normally written off or romanticized and treats them as full, flawed people. The cowboy term for that would be “respect,” and The Ranch both gives and earns it.

Netflix’s new multicamera sitcom, The Ranch, will seem familiar enough for fans of the genre, but it’s enjoyable and inventive enough to make you think there is still life left in the well-worn TV staple.

The Ranch isn’t perfect. Colt’s stupidity is sometimes exaggerated to the point you wonder how he doesn’t walk into walls and there’s a Two and a Half Men relentlessness to the sex jokes that can grow old. But the Bennetts feel real, and so, surprisingly, does their ranch, even if it’s just a stage set.

[The Ranch is] unexpectedly sensitive, well-acted and formally adventurous, in addition to often being broadly funny.

The Ranch is a red-state sitcom, though it takes place in the swing state of Colorado, and is good enough to be watched by people of any political affiliation. The goodness sneaks up on you. It is a sitcom that is meatier than it is funny, unusually in touch with the painful, disappointing aspects of life.

Mediocre is mediocre, whether the format is conventional or unconventional, or, like The Ranch, a measured mingling of both. But today, it’s a refreshing change of pace that offers some modest but meaningful rewards.

But basically, shorn of a few four-letter words and an occasional arm thrust up the cervix of a cow, there's nothing about The Ranch that wouldn't fit in just fine on network television, and that goes for both sides of the camera: The veteran, bankable cast. The workmanlike producers (Don Reo and Jim Patterson, lately of Two and a Half Men, as is Kutcher). The cookie-cutter sets. The three-camera photography and editing. The laugh track.

If he seems a little too dense at times, Kutcher has a good way with amiable idiots, and Masterson does well with bittersweet sarcasm. Still, it's Elliott and Winger (it's exciting just to see her working, I admit), coming from outside the genre, who make The Ranch feel at least a little new.

Though much of The Ranch feels familiar, and an odd fit for Netflix, that doesn't mean it's terrible. For all the crude jokes (the premiere, for example, goes on and on about how Uggs are girly footwear, not suitable for a real man), Kutcher and Masterson have an easy, unforced brotherly rapport.

The Ranch isn’t hateable as much as just bone-weary. It’s a by-the-dots, or the numbers--whichever are easiest to connect--sitcom that proceeds according to formula.

Beau resents his son for abandoning the family homestead. Rooster enjoys egging them on. The war of words can sometimes feel brutal. The work gives Kutcher a chance to truly act, to bring some pathos to the fore, but The Ranch is a slog.

The jokes are frequent, if not all that imaginative, but funny enough. But what makes the show modestly enjoyable is its innate sweetness and an approximate authenticity of context.

A low-energy, laugh-tracked sitcom that feels like a mid-season replacement from 1978.

The Ranch acts as an anthology series within a series, burning through multiple premises in an episodic fashion, which is ultimately just unsatisfying.

It’s not clever, or witty, or trying to be either. It’s just another dirt-level mediocre sitcom about a dysfunctional family that can say “fuck” all it wants.

A series in which everything feels not merely derivative but a little too on the nose, as if an audience weaned on such fare couldn’t discern where its various beats are heading.

The three men tease one another about old girlfriends and underage women--and then they make up, in pause-filled scenes that become awkwardly dramatic as the minutes pass and writing fails to rise to the occasion.