The Goldbergs - series premiere - "Circle of Driving"

THE GOLDBERGS is a family nostalgia sitcom about growing up in the eighties. The comedy is alternately shouty and coy, and I’m not fond of either. Humor based on bygone fads is terribly easy and cheap – variations of look at the crazy stuff people used to (fill in the blank - wear, eat, watch on TV); the other major comic strand, the dysfunctional wacky family, is as cliché as they come.

The Mindy Project - season 2 premiere - "All My Problems Solved Forever..."

THE MINDY PROJECT is amiable and pleasant, if not terribly funny. The sitcom speak is a bit less obtrusive than in worse shows, but the dialogue still occasionally betrays the situations and characters for unnatural comic lines. Not as distrustful of the audience as a laugh-track sitcom, it utilizes the single-camera alternative: cutting to close up, mugging comic reactions from the actors, an elbow in the viewer’s side, nudgingly pleading for acknowledgement of the jokes, “Get it, get it.” You know in an early scene with Mindy and her beau seated precariously on a tree branch they will fall off it, and they do. Outside of the appealing lead, the cast is bland and forgettable.

2 Broke Girls - season 3 premiere - "And the Soft Opening"

2 BROKE GIRLS is an odd couple comedy: Beth Behrs is the chipper, vivacious, chic, optimistic blonde Caroline and Kat Dennings is her opposite, the dour, slothful, slovenly, pessimistic raven-haired Max. The pair are waitresses in a diner who in this episode open up a cupcake shop in a back room. Roughly half of the humor is derived from dick jokes, another twenty percent from vagina jokes, the remaining thirty percent divvied up among ethnic and racist stereotypes, drug jokes, jokes about Matthew Moy’s diminutive stature and jokes about Kat Dennings’s ample chest. The show’s racism is delivered with carefree aplomb, unlike the aggressive, attention-seeking, desperate racism of Fox’s DADS; and the crude humor comes with a snappy and cheerful zing – the nastiness never feels nasty because the characters take the insults with shrugs and indifference. The story becomes moralistic as it wraps up – the characters’ learn a corny lesson and hug it out. Not having seen this show before, which is now in its third year, I’m puzzled by Dennings’s muddied delivery – one would hope after two years she’d be better at getting lines out, but nearly each of her quips gets snagged and garbled in her throat.