If at first you don't succeed, why the heck not rework your sitcom a bit and try it all over again?
That's pretty much what former "Partners" executive producers Jeff Greenstein and Jeff Strauss have done with "Getting Personal," which premieres Monday at 7:30 p.m. on Fox/Ch. 13.The two Jeffs - veterans of "Friends" and HBO's "Dream On" - created, produced and wrote (or supervised the writing) on "Partners." As a matter of fact, the show was based on their own re-la-tion-ship.
That's certainly much less true of "Getting Personal," but the parallels between this show and "Partners" are unmistakable.
- Both center on three main characters - two male friends and a woman who has a personal relationship with one of them.
- Both are workplace comedies, and the two guys are pretty much work partners.
- In both shows, Jon Cryer plays one of the guys.
There are also some decided differences - most notably that, unlike "Partners," "Getting Personal" features a multiracial cast.
Cryer is the white guy here. He plays Sam Wagner, a somewhat nerdy editor at a small commercial production company in Chicago. His best friend is Milo Doucette (Duane Martin), the smooth-talking producer/salesman.
And, while the male-female relationship in "Partners" was between two people who were engaged to one another, in "Getting Personal" it's a considerably more antagonistic situation. Milo has a tremendously terrible blind date (set up by Sam) with Robyn Buckley (Viveca Fox) - and the next day discovers that she is his new boss.
Instant antagonism.
Cryer and Martin are both just fine in their roles. But, somewhat surprisingly, Fox turns in a cartoonish characterization that's considerably less than we might expect from her.
"Getting Personal" does, at times, feature the same sort of bright, witty writing that Greenstein and Strauss have been doing ever since they were penning scripts for HBO's "Dream On." But "Personal" doesn't seem to have the same sort of honesty and believability that made "Partners" a gem.
And Greenstein may have in-ad-vertantly offered an explanation about that as he tried to explain how he and his partner got from "Partners" to "Getting Personal."
"It was obviously very difficult, because it was a show we loved," Greenstein said. "But with some distance and tending toward the philosophical, we kind of thought, well, it wasn't a show that was really in sync with where the Fox network was going at the time."
(Which is probably true - "Partners" was smart and funny, without resorting to histrionics.)
"So when we set out to develop a show this time, we wanted the same level of relatability, we wanted the same real characters, we wanted the same real relationships," Greenstein said. "But we made a certain decision with that type of comedy to be a little bit more aggressive."
And, in this case, "aggressive" is code for "loud" and "crude."
Just minutes into Monday's pilot episode, Robyn is already in a snit, complaining that, "On the way over here my cab gets stuck behind some fool in a Porsche who was driving 8 miles an hour so everyone could see he has a tiny little penis."
(And what a surprise it is when we learn that was Milo driving the car.)
Not that the show isn't balanced. There are jokes about both male and female contraceptives. There's also a male anatomy joke too tasteless to reprint here, and multiple crude references to the female anatomy.
A second episode provided to critics includes Robyn's mother loudly having sex with a much-younger man in the room next door and some over-the-top disco-dancing that could have been a scene from "Martin" (or possibly "Family Matters").
There's also Robyn's pot-smoking granny in a number of scenes that play drug abuse for laughs. Ha, ha.
The supporting cast isn't much to get excited about. The pilot includes a brief stint by Elliott Gould as the rather eccentric big boss at the commercial company. (He does not, however, appear in the second episode provided to critics, and he will, apparently, be on-again, off-again.)
The other supporting cast members make little or no impression at all - with the exception of Reggie Hayes, who plays a pompous, overeducated twit, a gofer who is gratingly annoying.
The really sad thing about "Getting Personal" is that we saw in "Partners" just what Greenstein and Strauss are capable of. It's a shame they've settled for far less this time around.