Give TNT credit for venturing beyond the realm of cops, docs and lawyers for its latest original series Trust Me. Then immediately take some of that credit back for TNT having the bad luck—one assumes—to launch a comedy-drama about an ad agency in the age of Mad Men. Of course, given TNT’s impressive track record with their original programming, maybe Mad Men partisans are the ones who should be worried. If TNT can draw higher ratings with the by-the-numbers legal drama Raising The Bar than AMC can with one of the best shows in television history, then there’s no reason to think that Trust Me won’t connect broadly, no matter how bland it is.
And make no mistake: A few stray cusswords aside, Trust Me is very, very bland. Affable TV vets Eric McCormack and Tom Cavanagh co-star as, respectively, an art director and copywriter for a frazzled Chicago agency. In the series premiere, McCormack gets promoted after his boss dies, and though Cavanagh is initially irritated that his former partner and best friend is now the man in charge, eventually the team pulls together to pitch a new campaign to Arc Mobile, a cel phone company.
Meanwhile, Monica Potter arrives as a hot young copywriter with Clios-aplenty for her work at other agencies, and a chip on her shoulder about the kind of work female copywriters are often forced to handle. (“I don’t do shampoo,” she grumbles.) In fact, much of Trust Me seems to be covertly about traditional gender roles and the subversion thereof. When one of Potter’s new cubicle-mates wants to denigrate the masculinity of his co-worker, he tells Potter, “If you need a Billy Joel poster, Tom here has a couple thousand.” And when McCormack’s boss (played by Griffin Dunne) wants to woo him to take a promotion, he uses a complicated skeletal metaphor and coos, “You are my cartilage.”
Mostly though, Trust Me is about the collaboration between the loose, swing-for-the-fences Cavanagh and his uptight family-man pal McCormack. We watch them brainstorm a lame-sounding campaign about text messaging throughout history (using a character Cavanagh dubs “Spar-text-icus”) and we follow the rest of the agency through disastrous focus group sessions and several abandoned slogans (from the not-bad “Way Beyond The Call” to the terrible “Let Your Thumbs Do The Talking”) until Cavanagh saves the day at the last minute with the absolutely awful tagline, “What Can You Do With One Hand?”