Friday, October 18, 2013

Review: The Crazy Ones 1x04 "Breakfast Burrito Club"


Original air date: Oct. 17, 2013


I’m a little behind this morning so bear with me as I settle in with my mug of tea.
While this show has some great actors such as Robin Williams, Sarah Michelle Gellar, James Wolk, Hamish Linklater, and Amanda Setton… this sitcom just feels flat.

In this week’s episode Sydney (Gellar) is being forced to go on a much needed but much dreaded vacation by her father and business partner Simon (Williams).  Sydney is a work-aholic.  She never leaves the office and her wildest fantasy includes beach blazers and giving the pitch of her life.  As she’s about to leave, the advertising firm finds out last minute that a meeting scheduled for next week for breakfast burritos has been push to the morning.

Sydney quickly puts her travel plans on hold as she feels she needs to be there to supervise the group and more importantly her father.  Which ends up being a task akin to herding cats.  While attempting (and failing) to come up with ideas they share stories about their love lives, read some odd poetry, and at one moment of crazy insanity burn a cardigan in the trash bin.


This many episodes in, my hope would have been for these characters to actually feel like characters and not just one-dimensional cartoons.  While we got a glimpse at what could be a future budding romance between Sydney and Andrew (Linklater) there wasn’t much else.

Usually the episodes end on a warm fuzzy father-daughter scene between Sydney and Simon as they lay out for the audience the lesson they’ve learned this week.  It’s obvious that they’ve never had a traditional father-daughter relationship as Sydney has had to be the responsible one in their relationship.  It’s this relationship which makes up the backbone of the show and while it has the potential to be something special… it seems it’s given the writers an excuse not to flesh out the rest of the cast of characters.  Robin Williams is larger than life even on the small screen and tends to outshine the others.  Everyone else falls to the background and so far it seems the show feels content to leave it that way.


In conclusion: the best part of each episode are the ending credits which consist of outtakes of Robin Williams riffing. 

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