Weird Loners

Creator Michael Weithorn (“The King of Queens”) effortlessly pulls Weird Loners past the usual pilot-episode blues to deliver a single-camera show that is harmlessly offbeat and even fun to watch (with something of a “Happy Endings” vibe), thanks to a cast that clicks instantly.

This show is guided by sitcom pros, but it doesn’t feel like an old-pro show at all. It doesn’t go for easy or cheap laughs, and most of its scenes don’t follow the usual sitcom trajectory--instead, they take odd twists and turns.

It’s not loud or frenetic. It’s not particularly cutting-edge. It’s just funny, in a relaxed way that’s welcome somehow in a television spectrum full of pushiness and intensity.

Loners is goofy--the same way Knighton’s “Happy Endings” was--and that’s what makes it so fun.

For the most part, Weird Loners is done well enough to merit your attention.

Maybe network executives are just throwing their hands up for now and clearing the cupboard shelves of what’s left, which includes the funny, engaging Weird Loners.

A single-camera comedy with no laugh track, Weird Loners is a pleasant enough viewing experience.

The principals are all good.... And there are funny lines.... At the same time, the show feels something shy of essential.

Weird Loners is not so fresh as its title might presume. Its protagonists are more familiar than strange, and their stories are clichéd.

It has an appealing cast (here's hoping, in particular, that this is not the last we've seen of Kumbhani), and there are moments when actors and material mesh, as in a gleeful group attempt to lip-read a wedding. But then those moments pass, and the show falls back on jokes that are either creaky (could we please have an overweight character who isn't bitter or blissfully stupid?) or cruel.

Weird Loners wants to be a cheeky howl on behalf of the unloved, but it does little to elicit sympathy or laughter from its familiar, humorless, formulations of weirdness and lonesomeness. [3 Apr 2015, p.58]

The sitcom starts with one of the best introductions to a group of losers. By the end of the third episode Fox provided for review, I was yawning and daydreaming about buying nail fungus remover.

Weird Loners instead re-shuffles the aimless singles deck before falling well short of coming up aces.

As is, the series spends an inordinate amount of time concerned with matters below the belt--including Stosh’s complaint that with Eric hanging around, he won’t be able to “choke the sheriff”--and delivers less charm or laughs than something like “New Girl,” itself a show whose most “adorkable” days appear to be behind it.

Fox's new sitcom Weird Loners hates its characters to an almost pathological degree. .... The show feels like bullying.