No matter the TV time of year as the new episodes of our favorite shows are ramping up across the multichannel universe and the past season is ready to be caught up on our favorite formats. Available now on DVD, Mom: The Complete First Season is a banal lowest common denominator sitcom that proves that even pap can win an Emmy.
From creator Chuck Lorre, Anna Faris stars as Christy, a newly sober single mom working as a waitress in a high end restaurant who has to end up sharing her life and her AA meetings with her formerly estranged mother Bonnie (Alison Janney). To make matters worse, Christy’s teenage daughter Violet (Sadie Calvano) is now pregnant with her first child and you have three generations of dysfunctional mom’s trying to coexist under the same roof. All three women are trying to repair their relationships with the other and reinvent themselves going forward and the only constant in their lives is being able to lean on their Mom’s to get through it all.
It’s hard to argue with the success rate of creator Chuck Lorre but Mom is just such a dull and uninspired sitcom that it rarely provokes any kind of genuine laugh no matter how forced and awkward the situations get.
The premise is actually pretty decent with some natural comedic elements, but it is such an obvious two camera kind of sitcom that it telegraphs the jokes and the material to the point that not much is any genuine kind of surprise. While there are some genuine laughs, they are just too and far and between as it has such a canned feel that it borders on being campy for most of its setups never allowing for any natural comedy, just the ones that it is bleeding dry out of the script.
Anna Faris was supposed to be film comedy’s next queen or at the very least ‘It’ and as she transitions to the small screen she proves over and over again that she just can’t carry a project in a leading role capacity. She gets a few moments here and there but as our hopelessly flummoxed heroine she is actually more annoying and desperate then actually funny. Alison Janney in her Emmy winning role was admittedly fun, but doing more of a Charlie Sheen in a middle aged woman type of role where she gets to play it over the top. It’s fun but nothing that I would exactly call groundbreaking. Out of the balance of the supporting cast, only French Stewart as the bi-curious head chef Rudy gets to deliver any genuine laughs.
As a sitcom, Mom is simply built for syndication on TV channels that play in doctor’s office and waiting rooms, as you will laugh once or twice, but it hardly the kind of show that you’d seek out and need to catch up on. It’s the definition of disposable TV.
The lone special feature on this 3 disc set is a gag reel.
