A little while back, I was talking about how few shows capture the feel of real life and community as well as the UK sitcom Gavin & Stacey does. That show moves to its own sweet, amiable rhythms, and it doesn't feel like it needs to create forced melodrama or over-the-top situations to generate drama. As I thought about the review, though, I realized that I was sort of wrong that an American show would have trouble capturing this sort of feel. I wouldn't say that Modern Family has quite accomplished this, since it's less about forming new communities and more about reinforcing old ones, but it's certainly a show that's low on incident and very much about finding the humor in everyday life.
And then there's Cougar Town, which has gone – and I mean this as the highest praise possible – from a show about a woman heading back out into the dating scene in her 40s and having sex with 20somethings to something like an American version of Gavin & Stacey, a show about how the best communities are the ones you build around yourself and about how there are few things funnier than the things you do just to pass time with your friends. In this candid interview with Alan Sepinwall, co-creator Bill Lawrence talks about how the show went from its crass, high concept premise (which was, let's not forget, a premise that garnered the show a huge premiere audience) to a low concept show about just doing stupid stuff with your pals. In it, he talks about how the show's title has become an impediment to people who might like it sampling the show (and, yeah, we've made fun of the title here). Lawrence hopes he and ABC can agree to change the title, but I doubt that will happen. So consider this your official notice: Cougar Town has quietly become one of TV's best comedies, and we're going to be covering it next season. Because it's awesome.
The characters on Cougar Town have all grown in the show's first season. They're all believably flawed. But they're all also somehow innately lovable. This seems to be a specialty of Lawrence's work, stretching back to Spin City (which wasn't my favorite show ever but definitely had a great roster of characters), and he and fellow creator Kevin Biegel have gone out of their way to make the show as funny as, say, Scrubs while toning down that show's flights of fancy. If Scrubs is a show about the limitless possibilities of starting out in your life and career, Cougar Town is more in touch with the rhythms of how life starts to feel when you begin to have to slow down. I'm not the first person to make this comparison, but when the couple with unresolved sexual tension on Scrubs hooks up in season one, it's a one-episode fling because they both know they're not ready (or right) for this. When that couple hooks up on this show, they give it a shot, because how many more shots at happiness are they going to get?
Cougar Town hasn't been perfect in its first season (or, more accurately, it hasn't been perfect in the 15 or so episodes since the show made the change from being a show about middle-aged women having sex to a show about friends just living their lives). There have been moments when it's seemed like some of the actors – all of whom have a tendency toward being a little broad, outside of Dan Byrd – were all starring in completely different shows. There are jokes that are hilarious in the moment but make a little less sense within the show's less fanciful reality as you think about them (for example: Jules getting Ellie to make a dance remix of Grayson's "couples" speech in tonight's episode, which is very funny but also kind of implausible, given the circumstances). There have been a few too many episodes where someone tells a stupid lie to someone else for largely unbelievable reasons (one of my TV pet peeves). And there can be moments when the show forces the sentimentality a little bit, even when it can usually get away with such things. (Lawrence and Biegel have never met a sleepy-sounding singer-songwriter they couldn't score a poignant montage to.)