Throughout this TV season, I’ve been watching each “friends and relations in various relationship stages” sitcom as they've debuted—Traffic Light, Perfect Couples, Happy Endings, what-have-you—and yet the only one I keep returning to week after week is the squarest of the bunch, Better With You. It’s not just that I think Better With You is funnier than its competition; it’s also that it has a better sense of what it’s trying to be. All those other shows were greenlit in part because of the success of Modern Family, so each in their own way tries by turns to be sweet, sweeping, and of-the-moment. At their core, though, all three are in the tradition of Friends, in that they feature a half-dozen youngish people, sitting around and joking and philosophizing about life’s minutiae. They’re all funny at times and groaningly contrived at others, and each features an actor or character or two that I’d like to promote to some kind of All-Star Edition of this particular sitcom genre. And yet I don’t watch any of them regularly, because whenever I check out an episode I get annoyed by the lazy reliance on smutty jokes and the overall smug attitude, which implies that the writers think that these sitcoms are hipper than they actually are.
Better With You, on the other hand, doesn’t pretend to be anything its not. It’s a three-camera sitcom with laughter, and though it apes the snappy, time-bending structure of How I Met Your Mother, the show derives most of its humor from one of the oldest subjects around: kooky in-laws. Kurt Fuller and Debra Joe Rupp play Joel and Vicky Putney, retired old marrieds with quirks aplenty. Jennifer Finnigan plays their oldest daughter, Maddie, a fussy attorney who’s been in a committed, non-married relationship with hotel manager Ben (Josh Cooke) for nearly a decade. Joanna Garcia plays the youngest Putney, Mia, a good-natured-but-selfish entrepreneur who’s engaged to be married to Casey (Jake Lacey), a handsome hippie goofball. Each episode starts and ends by showing how three different couples deal with some common couples’ issue—like sharing the last piece of cake—and then the bulk of any given episode follows the characters as they have some disagreement that leads to them deceiving each other and forming fleeting alliances before they all reconcile (usually to their mutual dissatisfaction). The show is reliably formulaic, fast-paced, and very funny when it really gets cooking.
Tonight’s episode, sadly, didn’t cook that much—unlike last Wednesday’s episode, which was a riff on “how we met” stories that got progressively more farcical as each characters’ lies were uncovered. Airing on a Monday to get a little exposure from the Dancing With The Stars crowd, “Better With Dancing” suffers from one of Better With You’s most persistent storytelling flaws: trying to pretend that the characters’ silly non-problems are universal. (Pretty much every one of these “couples hanging out” shows has this problem.) In the A-story, Mia is annoyed with Casey because in their practices for the big first dance at their upcoming wedding, he’s shown himself to be an absolute dud of a hoofer. Their dance instructor, though, sniffs out the truth: Casey is an amazing dancer but dances badly on purpose, because he knows that women hate it when their men are the better dancers. (Am I right, ladies? No seriously, I’m asking… I’ve never heard of this being an issue.)
The Casey/Mia storyline generates some funny moments, like when Vicky teaches Mia the power of the well-placed insult to get a man to shape up, or when Casey comes clean and explains that because he grew up in a house full of girls, he’s “great at girl things,” like wrapping presents, telling shades of yellow apart, and handwriting. (“I can ice the crap out of a cake,” he half-boasts.) But again, the dopiness of the premise is a major drag.