Fox’s back-to-back new sitcoms, Raising Hope and Running Wilde, premiered on Tuesday night, and two more different shows are difficult to imagine.
Raising Hope is from Greg Garcia, the writer-producer who gave us My Name Is Earl. Like Earl, Raising Hope is grungy and low-down, interested in the challenges faced by at least 90% of America: How to take care of your family, make money, find time for love. The premise is a nicely exaggerated one that’s quickly rooted firmly in Garcia’s brand of sitcom reality. A teen (Lucas Neff) acquires a baby from a one-night stand; he decides to keep the kid and raise it, even though he’s still being raised at home by his parents (the terrific Garret Dillahunt and the wonderful Martha Plimpton). Cloris Leachman stumps into the room now and then to utter a hostile non sequitur.DIARY OF THE DEAD (2007)
I thought Raising Hope was sweet and funny — I laugh at its sight gags (the baby rolling around in its untethered car-seat) and think the chemistry between Dillahunt and Plimpton is what every sitcom needs, which is: You have to believe right from the start that these people love each other, fight a lot, and that you’ve known them for years.
By contrast — and the contrast is huge, maybe insurmountable — Running Wilde is conceived as a classically structured screwball comedy, in which a person of high stature is brought low by gentle humiliation and slapstick. In this case, it’s Will Arnett as a rich jerk trying to buy the affection of a woman he’s loved for years (Keri Russell). Russell used her wide eyes to express disbelief at the foolish, spendthrift ways of Arnett’s Steve Wilde. As indigent, professional do-gooder Emmy, Russell also has a clever daughter named Puddle (played by the devilishly good Stephania Owen). This trio is supplemented by two characters who work for Steve, one of whom, Robert Michael Morris, will always be, to me, Mickey the make-up man in Lisa Kudrow’s great, short-lived The Comeback.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Raising Hope
news.com
Posted in: 
