There are many reasons why good sitcoms are set at work. If the workplace itself is interesting (like a busy, big-city police department or the offices of a late-night show, for example), the challenge of meeting the job’s expectations provides fuel for an episode’s conflicts and shenanigans. If it’s is stultifying and meaningless, characters bond over and chafe under their shared ennui. The paper company of The Office is an ideal version of the latter, the ubiquitous blankness of the product acting as an apt metaphor for the unending white noise of the daily grind.
DMV, CBS’s new sitcom about the perpetually harried denizens of a rundown Hollywood motor-vehicle bureau, faces the unique challenge of finding new ways to make a joke out of a joke. The actual rituals of Americans’ dreaded visits to the DMV are such a tattered and trampled punchline of both stand-up and real life that a series set in one had better have something fresh to bring to the party.
Sadly, the show (created by Dana Klein and inspired by Katherine Heiny’s short story “Chicken-Flavored And Lemon-Scented”) traffics in clichés. Old ladies run over forests of driving-test cones. Rich jerks gripe about proper (easily-googleable) Real ID documentation. The office fridge is a crime scene. Irritated customers perform would-be wacky things in line—and so on. Meanwhile, DMV‘s attempt at an Office-style knockabout ensemble piece proves blandly low-wattage, despite the ever-steadying presence of Tim Meadows as Gregg, the longest-serving and least perturbable of the show’s put-upon functionaries.
On the workplace front, the beats come in predictable lockstep, where the nondescript office is divided between the driving testers and the paper-pushers. Behind the wheel are Meadows’ Gregg, buoyed by the actor’s signature beaming, underplayed cynicism; Tony Cavalero’s Vic, whose himbo-oddball schtick includes steering his test-takers through the McDonald’s drive-thru (which they pay for); and Harriet Dyer’s Colette, whose chipper optimism and fumbling awkwardness mark her out as DMV’s nominal lead. Colette’s infatuation with new guy on the documents window Noa (The Rings of Power’s Alex Tarrant) also signals her position at the head of the ensemble, with brash photo ID jockey Ceci (Gigi Zumbado) and former SNL player Molly Kearney’s newly promoted manager Barbara filling out the shift roster.
It’s not an entirely unpromising group. Alongside Meadows, Aussie actor Dyer has already proven her rom-com cred in homeland hit Colin From Accounts, while Kearney’s booming presence as thegung-ho but insecure Barbara fits nicely. Cavalero appears to be channeling the Workaholics iteration of his Righteous Gemstones partner Adam Devine at points, but his weird energy offsets some of Vic’s abrasiveness.
At the same time, theassembled talents are slotting into a set of types far too diffuse to make much impact. Dyer doesn’t lean enough into either Colette’s cmishaps or thwarted do-gooder naivete, while Kearney’s turn as the blustering Barbara is no Michael Scott, saddled as she is with a running gag about her being too unworldly to recognize, say, a vibrator from the lost and found. (She also keeps referring to the state’s capital as “Big Sac,” with all the attendant wordplay that entails.)
But it’s in DMV’s efforts to manufacture a Jim/Pam workplace romance that the show labors the most. Dyer’s character stammers her way toward the stolidly hunky Noa again and again, ultimately thwarted by wheezy sitcom plotting as much as Colette’s rumpled insecurities. The pilot sees her impaled shirtless on a nail while attempting to escape through the communal bathroom window, while another episode forces her to grade calamitous neophyte driver Noa’s road test. (She’s dubbed “E-Z Pass” by co-workers for never failing anybody.) That surfer-dude Noa is either clever and competent or dim-bulb clueless according to the needs of each of the first four episodes is a genuine worry. As is, Tarrant and Dyer’s lukewarm chemistry as they weave toward an inevitable future pairing bumps against manufactured obstacles aplenty without either character being engaging enough to care all that much about.
The same goes for the running of this particular branch. The pilot brings in a lightly kooky pair of government inspectors, whose revelation to the panicked Barbara that theirs is one of four area DMVs being evaluated for potential closure. That should set off a ticking clock but for the fact that the next three episodes abandon the thread entirely in favor of watching Colette try to fool a judgmental visiting actor friend that she’s really a veterinarian.
This is a resolutely unambitious portrait of lowest-rung bureaucrats lightly peppered with tonally indifferent stabs at character development and overarching purpose. Kearney’s Barbara makes an effortful case in the pilot that the DMV’s mandatory democratic drudgery despite “what you look like or how much money you make or if you went to college” is somehow meaningful. Meanwhile, the workers’ perennial gripes about their roles in “the most despised institution in America” (there’s a lot of competition there) give way to the occasional flash of hazy, half-realized idealism. (Meadows’ Gregg is much more convincing as he shepherds new hire Noa through hard-won DMV rewards like pantomiming his non-existent cigarette during smoke breaks or “going number zero” to goof off in the bathroom.)
As with most work-related premises, there’s undoubtedly a good sitcom lurking at the DMV. Coupled with the ordinary drudgery of the average office, the added theme of governmental hoop-jumping, and burdensome red tape and expense offers unique layers of employee and customer exasperation to play with. But the glimmers of invention (the driving testers keep track of the number of days since they were almost killed on a whiteboard) are so meager here that this DMV feels as perfunctory and forgettable as re-registering your car.
