Trial & Error

On Trial & Error, the answer a little too often is to lean on the fish-out-of-water moments that Josh encounters in a town full of yokels so clichéd they might have come from a bottle in the writers' room marked Southern Stereotypes: Just Add Water. ... But it's Lithgow, as the hopelessly self-centered, sneakily endearing suspect, who steals every scene he's in.

Lithgow is superb every time he’s on-camera, but Trial & Error has its own trial-and-error growing pains to go through before it either settles into something you want to watch every week, or a novelty that doesn’t sustain itself.

If it can shift its sights to a more demanding target, there’s potential here for a fresh and ingenious new kind of comedy. But it requires sharper writing to make murder funny than the show currently possesses. There’s more to satire than simply taking a serious subject and stuffing it full of gags.

This deeply silly sitcom may be guilty of overplaying its hard to score cheap laughs, especially at the expense of Southern-yokel sterotypes and running gags that quickly run out of gas. But with the glorious John Lithgow at its center, [...] it's wise to recuse oneself from delivering a verdict too quickly. [6-19 Mar 2017, p.21]

A featherweight entertainment with a good cast, some charm, and not nearly enough laughs.

“The Jinx” constantly surprised. Trial & Error seems like it’s just going through the motions.

The series has yet to find any pairings or relationships with any real repartee or comedic chemistry, so the show is a lot of individuals elevating tired material with strong line readings, including guest stars like Bob Gunton, Cristine Rose, Ginger Gonzaga and Patricia Belcher.

It’s great to see Lithgow, who won a Golden Globe earlier this year for playing Winston Churchill in Netflix’s series “The Crown,” but there’s not much challenge here for him and too few laughs.

Trial & Error is more a case of hit and miss. Wildly uneven, it tries way too hard to be eccentric, often following big laughs with wearisomely forced and labored moments.

Maybe a few new characters and a plot shakeup could be enough to invigorate what is, for now, a mostly forgettable piece of work.