TV — Joey

Joey, you’re no Frasier

By Amy Diaz [adiaz@hippopress.com]

Joey, Thursday at 8 p.m. on NBC


Father of the Pride, Scrubs, Will & Grace and Joey—what do these four shows have in common?

They are the only four sitcoms on NBC. NBC, the network from whence came just about every big sitcom of the 1980s. The network that has owned the sitcom genre, especially the Thursday-night sitcom genre, since Rudy Huxtable was still a lisping bundle of ponytails.

And now, only four remain.

Of those, two are old, two are new and only one is funny. And guess what? Joey is not that one.

Joey is an attempt to cash in on Friends via the Frasier method. Pick one of the least over-exposed characters and build around him a spin-off. But where Frasier Crane was a little-known priss with character flaws just waiting to be mined for comic purpose, Joey Tribiani (Matt Le Blanc) has played that dumb actor thing pretty hard and, especially in the last few seasons, in some of the main story plots. Is there anything new here?

Well, there is a new location—Los Angeles, where Tribiani seeks the big break he feels he deserves. And he has new roomies—his sister Gina (Drea de Matteo), a Sopranos-accented hair dresser, and her son Michael (Paulo Costanzo), a geeky scientist who is Joey’s social and intellectual opposite. He also has a smartypants neighbor, Alex (Ashley Scott), who plays a more tightly wound, more successful version of the Friends Monica character.

The humor is standard Friends, which wouldn’t be so bad except that it’s sort of third-level plot-filler Friends humor. Joey was—and I don’t think this really comes as a shock, it’s just more noticeable—the least interesting character on the show. He played the foil. His simple-minded approach to everything was his character’s primary purpose for being in the scene. It provided something for his costars to snark against. On his own, he seems like he’s perpetually waiting for someone to play off him.

And the other characters try. Michael holds the place of a younger Ross. Alex is the one exasperated or bemused by his doings. Gina is, well, either she’s the character that makes him look smart or the one that makes him look classy—the show seems to have a hard time deciding whether it wants her to be dumber than him or just needier and trashier.

In fairness, I don’t remember much about those first episodes of Frasier—it likely took a while for the chemistry, the relationships and the humor of that show to fall into a groove. But what doesn’t give me much optimism with Joey is that Frasier from the beginning held the promise of developing into a smarter, more sophisticated brand of comedy than Cheers ever was. Joey, on the booger-joke-to-Noel-Coward comedy scale, seems to have nowhere to go but down.

- Amy Diaz