Trial & Error

The humor is a combination of sight gags, slapstick and wordplay. And, again, nobody does it better than Lithgow in all three phases.

Trial & Error has the kind of good bones and fool-proof premise that could make for a great, long-running sitcom (the plan is to debut a new crime every season). The performances are mostly wonderful--you won’t find me bad-mouthing Lithgow--and the already-tiring true-crime genre was due for a good zinging. It got one.

Call me crude, immature, and jejune—editors do, all the time—but I cannot help but feel a certain fondness for a show in which characters have names like Judge Horsedich. And any comedy casting Shepherd deserves special recognition.

Consistently funny and with surprisingly engaging twists for a comedy, Trial & Error commits few errors through its first three episodes.

It's silly and sometimes slapstick, but it works. And what makes it work is that Lithgow is so good as the alleged murderer.

It’s frequently possible to see the jokes in Trial & Error coming from a mile away, but the commitment of the performers somehow makes even the silliest punchlines very funny.

In its casting, Trial & Error gets every­thing right.

This isn’t Noel Coward. In fact, it’s not even “Modern Family,” but it’s funny and gives renewed meaning to the term “comic relief.”

You’ll likely at least be grinning, if not sometimes laughing out loud. Because after a halting start, the amusements are plentiful during the three half-hours made available for review.

A good percentage of the show's jokes land, and the show’s structure (it's effectively a 13-episode miniseries, with each episode ending with a trial-specific cliffhanger) is a welcome variation on the conventional sitcom form. Plus you have Lithgow, giving another master class in comedy.

It’s not nearly as funny as either ["The Office" and "Parks and Recreation"], and it sometimes sacrifices its most promising potential (making fun of true-crime serializations) to pick off easier targets (making fun of the South). ... Lithgow’s effort rubs off on his energetic co-stars, who elevate the material and give it a spark it otherwise wouldn’t have.

It’s a comedy that, if you can adjust to its deliberate dumbness, grows on you.

High art it's not, but as breezy, reasonably clever comedies go, this NBC show earns a favorable verdict.

Trial & Error is solid and funny, impressively cast and in no significant sense groundbreaking.

I laughed out loud at this kooky, uneven spoof, whose jokes are almost inevitably about how profoundly stupid the characters are. Sometimes, idiocy is the ticket.