Go On

It's a new NBC comedy starring Matthew Perry! Well, considering that NBC has been relatively solid in their new comedies over the past few years (Get back in the corner, Whitney!) and the show buzz has been positive, I figured, "why not?"
Half-hour comedies get a lot more play in my household since my wife will usually tolerate them and they are much less of a time commitment than dramas.  Plus, Go On, is a single-camera show, the superior form of TV comedies.  Seriously, I'm barely tolerating How I Met Your Mother; every other multi-camera comedy I've seen since becoming an adult killed a part of my soul.  So, as of today, I've watched the first two episodes of Go On and have found it kind of amusing, but not without serious fault.

Matthew Perry, playing the ultimate version of Chandler from Friends, plays a sports-talk host whose wife recently died in a terrible accident ("Could I BE anymore of a widower?") forced to join a local support group full of other similarly zany characters including:
a) crazy cat lady
b) old black man
c) uptight Asian woman
d) the kid from Everybody Hates Chris
e) milquetoast white guy
f) insane guy, with a beard! (by far my favorite character mostly because he plays the role increasingly -insane-ly.  Perhaps he'll murder someone before the show is over?)
g) the Mexican housekeeper from The Goonies

Bleeding-heart white lady with absolutely no licensure in therapy or psychology just happens to lead this group because she truly believes that she can help people.  As someone with a BA in psychology, these sorts of set-ups really weird me out.  Why would Matthew Perry go to such a group? Was it because he wanted to take the path of least resistance in meeting his boss's counseling requirement to re-enter the workforce? Are the writers so sensitive to the plight of people with mental illness that they wanted to move as far from real therapy as possible to avoid accusation of poking fun at these victims?

A veritable cornucopia of cast mates!

In any case, Matthew Perry co-opts the group with his brand of wackiness, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest-style and learns multiple lessons including: 1) therapy is not as useful as being an ass 2) being an ass leads to acting-out behavior towards NFL players 3) we've all got a lot to learn about one another.  And, following both episodes, I'm guessing that the show will slip into a comfortable format in which one of the group mates has a problem which blows out of proportion when Matthew Perry tries to "help"...with hilarious results!

And that's the problem.  If you would like a show and care very little that it may or may not have amibition to be another more than an OK comedy, you could get some decent mileage out of Go On.  And it may turn out to be pretty awesome over time.  With so many distinct characters, the opportunities for development and interplay staggers the mind.  Here's a show that could easily plan out three or four solid seasons right now with the options they've placed on the table.  But will the show ever capitalize on these opportunities?

While I watched the second episode I had two (IMO) awesome ideas for ways the show could go.  What if Matthew Perry's shtick of taking advantage of these poor, suffering people from his group in the subconscious pursuit of trying to fill the hole created by the absence of his late wife continued week to week?  And what if, by the end of the season, the audience realized just how much harm he had done to all of these other characters that we had grown to like...and that our enjoyment of the situations his selfishness created was just as cruel as Matthew Perry using his new "friends"? Or what if the obvious sexual tension between Matthew Perry and the group leader-lady led to their dating? And, while the relationship starts out well, it utterly derails the healing dynamic of the group...and what will happen when they finally break up? Questions zoom around my head concerning the nature of grief and counseling, of how people look for quick fixes rather than true mental health, how these choices can be dangerous, and how to keep a show with these dark undertones funny overall.

I'm not a professional TV writer but I know what I like and would rather watch the show I just described in the previous paragraph than the two episodes I've watched so far.  And maybe Go On will capitalize on these sorts of plots and become something out-of-the-ordinary.  If I have to play the odds, I'll predict that Go On squanders its potential for the easy route of mild mass-market amusement.  And that would be sad but, invariably Meh.

I predict this guy to be the Fonz of Go On

I'll come back to Go On in a few episodes to determine whether this is a lasting rating or not.