You know how friends was about a somewhat charming bunch of friends who lived nearby and generally found excusable reasons to be in each other’s apartments at various times, in ways that flowed really well if one accepted them as a tight-knit community?
Well, the new dumped-during-the-summer-months sitcom 100 Questions is like that, if one removes establishing who the characters are and why they are together in general and why they are all crowded onto a small set at a specific instant and just have it be a bunch of good-looking but not particularly likable people inhabiting a set, reusing comedy rhythms we’ve seen too many times before. It seems like the sort of thing that a good director like James Burrows might iron out the kinks of, and by golly they had James Burrows for a pilot but after he shot it they decided to strip out half the cast and try again, so his touch is gone and this thing is just a mess.
The central conceit of this is that our meant-to-be-beautiful-but-made-up-to-the-point-of-awkwardness lead female is answering a series of question for a dating service interview, and each question turns out to call for an episode-long flashback answer… thus giving it a framework much akin to, say, How I Met Your Mother only that it’s a series of individual stories being told rather than pieces of a bigger one, so the structure just seems repetitive. Perhaps if in the framing scenes, our lead lady was played by Bob Saget, that would make all the difference.
I’m trying to watch a second episode of this, to be fair… but it’s too much like work to do so, which is not fair for me. I’m scratching the rest of this off of the DVR right now.
