'Accidentally on
Purpose,' knocked off
CBS sitcom closely follows the hit movie 'Knocked Up'
By Tom Conroy
Sep 21, 2009
There’s nothing wrong with cribbing from a hit movie to make a sitcom, as long as the departures from the original are…um…original.
But “Accidentally on Purpose” merely overlays the premise of “Knocked Up”—a mismatched couple has an unplanned pregnancy and decides to stay together—with a heavy dose of overused sitcom devices, including the already-tired “cougar” theme.
The series, which premieres tonight on CBS at 8:30, does have a skilled, likable cast, and the jokes are plentiful and sometimes funny.
While “Accidentally on Purpose” is not an exact copy of “Knocked Up,” it’s close enough that it could be called “Knocked Off.” Like Katherine Heigl’s character in “Knocked Up,” Billie (Jenna Elfman) is a journalist who sleeps with a basically nice but unsuccessful guy and gets pregnant during what she thought was a one-night stand.
The father-to-be, Zack (Jon Foster) is somewhat more ambitious than the Seth Rogen character; he’s a chef, one of TV’s go-to jobs when writers want to let viewers know that a character is a nice guy.
But the scenes with Zack’s group of slacker friends look like videotaped outtakes from “Knocked Up,” or from dozens of other post-“Slackers” movies and TV shows about videogaming, pot-smoking youths.
Ashley Jensen, who plays Billie’s hard-drinking, trampy office buddy, is just as funny as she was when she played the exact same character on “Ugly Betty.”
The older-woman angle—Billie is 37; Zack is in his 20s—has been the subject of so many TV episodes’ plots and subplots that even when the writers come up with fresh jokes, the insights behind them are old.
Viewers who watch too much TV may be reminded of ABC’s failed 2000 sitcom “Then Came You,” in which the thirtyish woman was a book editor—Billie is a film critic—and the twentysomething lover was a waiter, not a chef.
What’s odd is that although “Accidentally on Purpose” seems to be based entirely on the writers’ observations of other TV shows and movies, it’s actually based on a memoir of the same name by Mary F. Pols.
Shot in the old-school multiple-camera format like CBS’s other Monday-night sitcoms, the show is written like a single-camera sitcom (like NBC’s Thursday comedies). The jokes come so fast that the people in the studio audience wouldn’t be laughing after each one; half the time, they would be would be saying “What?” because the laughter from one punch line would have drowned out the next.
Besides raising suspicions that the audience’s laughter has been heavily “sweetened,” this traditional format adds to the feeling we’ve seen this all before.
Jenna Elfman does raise everything a notch, radiating star quality and barreling through the implausibilities in the script.
Jon Foster does the best he can playing a fantasy figure, an impossibly nice, attractive and responsible guy with nothing in his own life to prevent him from devoting himself to his prospective child. By Pols’ account, his real-life counterpart is much more complicated.
This being a situation comedy, the premiere episode has to set up the situation, rushing through several life-changing decisions. After 22 minutes, we’re already into what movie screenwriters would call act three.
It’s difficult to see where the series can go next week and for the rest of the season. The creators seem unwilling to address the fact that this situation has more potential for heartbreak than laughter.
Still, Elfman proves in the premiere that she is capable of diverting viewers’ attention from this inconvenient truth. And a good time slot, between “How I Met Your Mother” and “Two and a Half Men”—appropriately enough, between courtship and divorce—should help.
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