Carlock, Robert

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Mr. Mayor’ Review: A Political Comedy From Sitcom RoyaltyRobert Carlock, Tina Fey and Ted Danson join forces for a show about a businessman who finds himself running a city.Ted Danson, left, and Bobby Moynihan in “Mr. Mayor,” a new NBC sitcom created by Robert Carlock and Tina Fey.Credit…Mitchell Haddad/NBCJan. 6, 2021“Mr. Mayor” has good sitcom DNA: Robert Carlock and Tina Fey of “30 Rock” and “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” on the writing and producing side; Ted Danson, most recently of “The Good Place” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” onscreen. What could go wrong?Yet something did, at least on the basis of the new NBC comedy’s first two episodes, which premiere on Thursday. That’s a very small sample, but it’s what we have, and it’s a jarringly flat 42 minutes of television.No blame goes to Danson, who strides through the role of Neil Bremer, the newly elected and largely unqualified mayor of Los Angeles, with his typical aplomb. Bremer has the charismatic lunkheadedness and chummy-needy temperament Danson has brought to characters from Michael, the afterlife architect of “The Good Place,” all the way back to Sam Malone in “Cheers.”There are moments when Danson reacts to a laugh line from one of Bremer’s aides — a pair of slick, young, neurotically woke apparatchiks (Vella Lovell and Mike Cabellon) and a rumpled white guy (Bobby Moynihan of “Saturday Night Live”) who is given to outsmarting them — with a blank stare. It’s because Bremer, played by the 73-year-old Danson, doesn’t get it. But in your head you may hear Danson, along with the rest of us, asking: “Seriously? That’s the best you could come up with?”So far, the show is full of lines that are meant to be funny, in a joke-adjacent kind of way, but don’t quite hit — they have the shape of humor but not the force. Most of these are predicated on a continual but uneasy satire of the current climate of political correctness; “Mr. Mayor” takes on cancel culture as one of its main subjects, and perhaps it does it as directly as you can on prime-time network TV, but the overall effect is of writers boldly tiptoeing.It starts to feel like a receiving line: We meet the pronoun joke (“The look in his eyes — their eyes — a lot of different eyes”); the me-too joke (“If you believe in something, don’t give up, don’t take no for answer, except for with sex, that’s different”); the cleverly inverted race joke (“You need to learn how to listen, whitey.” “Whitey?” “Your hair”).Bremer himself has some Trumpian characteristics. He’s a businessman — a billboard tycoon — with a Brobdingnagian mansion and a golf habit. His chief of staff, horrified at her role in actually getting him elected, moans, “I got him that toy phone and told him he was tweeting on it.” (There’s also a dig at a blue-city politician, when Bremer commits the gaffe of rolling up his pizza slice, inviting de Blasio-style ridicule.)But Bremer isn’t soulless or venal or particularly Machiavellian, in the mode of Alec Baldwin’s TV executive on “30 Rock.” He’s more of an earnest blunderer who ran for mayor to make his daughter (Kyla Kenedy) think he was cool.And that’s not the only note of sentimentality in “Mr. Mayor” — there’s an “aww” vibe to the father-daughter relationship and to Bremer’s jousting with a political rival, a progressive hardcase played by Holly Hunter. Beneath the carapace of political humor there appears to be a pretty ordinary family-and-workplace sitcom developing here. No one in “Mr. Mayor” is as eccentric or as outsize as characters like Liz and Jack in “30 Rock” or Kimmy Schmidt, and the result — perhaps unexpectedly, perhaps not — is that no one is as sympathetic or as moving, either.Maybe it had something to do with the New York settings, or the obvious enjoyment they took in savaging the TV business in “30 Rock.” But Carlock and Fey’s earlier shows had an energy, and a storybook quality, that isn’t there yet in “Mr. Mayor.” You feel it every time a music cue doesn’t make you smile the way they did in “30 Rock.”There’s some of the old offhand joy in scenes involving Bremer’s daughter, who’s running for office at her high school. Her argument that legalizing marijuana is anti-progressive because it hurts marginalized drug-peddling communities like “the poor, surfers and DJ’s with crushing DJ-school debt” is one of the better lines, and when her proud mic drop at the end of a campaign speech results in incapacitating feedback, it’s a minor but genuinely funny touch.They’re just grace notes, but they remind us that until now, Carlock and Fey’s genius has been for making stories entirely out of grace notes.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More