2 Broke Girls User Reviews

2 Broke Girls was a show I was very much looking forward to, I like Kat Dennings quite a lot and I’ve been hopeful that a more traditional multi-camera sitcom could come along that would bring both critical and commercial success back to the form. How I Met Your Mother has always been a bit of a niche show and has also melded the multi-camera form with single camera gags so it’s hard to point to it as anything other than a last bastion of quality in the form rather than the start of a new prominence for it. Sadly, 2 Broke Girls isn’t that show, or at least the pilot isn’t, asides from a few bright spots, and a game performance from Kat Dennings, this is a clunky, unfunny pilot that points out why the multi-camera form has fallen out of favor of late.

The pilot of 2 Broke Girls is aggressively quippy, nearly every intended laugh line is a one liner, and that just doesn’t quite work with the rhythms of the show. Every line gets delivered and then the laugh track kicks in and there’s a pause, which means that every time a joke fails we’re stuck reveling in its failure for far too long, and there are a lot of failed jokes in this pilot. A show like 30 Rock thrives at throwing joke after joke at the audience and the single camera format helps facilitate that atmosphere because when a joke fails the show can simply move right on to the next one without pausing. The multi-camera format isn’t as well suited to that style, and 2 Broke Girls doesn’t play to the more theatrically oriented strengths of its chosen form.

The problem doesn’t just come from the fact that the jokes fail, almost every character in this pilot is nothing but a one liner machine, which might not be a problem if the jokes were actually funny, as previously noted, they are not. What’s worse is that the characters aren’t much more than stereotypes either, there’s the Asian manager who switches his name to “Bryce Lee,” an eastern European cook, and the sassy old black man who tends the register. Apparently when Whitney Cummings and Michael Patrick King were writing this script it happened to be bargain day at the cliché store and they went to town.

That appreciation for easy clichés carries over into the joke writing as well, this is a broad pilot that never met an easy, overly simple character it didn’t like. Whether it’s hipsters, overly wealthy mothers, or terrible musicians, everyone is written in the most obvious way possible and the jokes do nothing to prop up the limp characterizations that make up the vast bulk of the show.

The most intriguing aspect of the show comes at the end of the pilot, I assumed that the driving force of the show would simply be the tension between the formerly rich Caroline and the always poor Max. Instead the show sets up a fairly strong overarching structure to follow, that of the two characters attempting to open their own bakery. I was surprised by this primarily because it’s actually a plot thread that’s well seeded and subtly built to over the course of the episode, two traits that just about every other aspect of this pilot don’t exhibit. Caroline consistently boasts of her smarts, and she even displays them once or twice when engineering a scam to make some extra cash off of Max’s cupcakes, but for some reason I didn’t think it would go much further than that. Instead the show is clearly hanging its hat on this ongoing thread, it even slaps a graphic at the end of each episode detailing precisely how much money the pair has saved towards their goal of $250,000. It’s a good idea and seeing Caroline actually surprise Max in that final scene is the first time where the show effectively breaks out of the simplistic characterizations it has established up to that point.

Based on the pilot of 2 Broke Girls I don’t think there’s much to recommend, but for some reason I’m going to stick around for a few episodes to see if this show can get on its feet. I don’t think it’s funny, I didn’t think it used the multi-camera format particularly well, and outside of Dennings I didn’t think any of the performances were particularly impressive, but I guess I’m just a sucker for a hook and that final one got me. I’d also like to see this show live up to Dennings’ potential as well as the potential of the multi-camera format. It’s a long shot to my mind, but where’s the fun in assuming the worst?

Other Thoughts:

• I barely even cracked a smile at this pilot and there were more than a few times where I audibly groaned at the creaky, overwritten puns so no quotes since I didn’t think anything was particularly worthy of quoting.
• I do sincerely hope this show gets better if only so the multi-camera sitcom doesn’t continue to languish in Chuck Lorre hell.