ABC Wednesdays @ 9:30pm ET
Junior attorney Kimmie Boubier and her two best friends Helen-Alice and Marika have had a standing date every Friday night for the last 13 years. They even have a motto for what they call “Friday Night Fun Night”: “Always together! Always Inside!” However, Kimmie’s recent promotion throws a monkey wrench into the tradition, and she meets a dashingly handsome British attorney, Richard Royce.
"Happy Endings" was cancelled for this???
A little less than two weeks before the premiere of this new comedy written by and starring Rebel Wilson ("Bridesmaids", "Pitch Perfect"), ABC made the mystifying decision to debut the show with its second episode, instead of its original pilot. The pilot would have introduced us to Kimmie Boubier (yes...as in "Booby-A") and her two friends who have a weekly tradition of staying inside every Friday night; but when Kimmie gets a promotion and falls in love with her new British coworker, she convinces her friends to take their Super Fun Night out to a club to try to impress him. We missed all that. Instead, we start the show with Kimmie already having received a promotion, already having fallen in love with Richard, and already having made the decision to leave her apartment on Fridays. We the viewers, having missed literally every inciting incident for the show's plot, were thrust into an episode full of references to a pilot we hadn't seen. It was like watching a bunch of people tell inside jokes that you don't understand.
Why ABC made this choice is beyond me. Was it in response to the negative reviews the pilot was receiving? Or was it to try to draw in "Pitch Perfect" fans with an episode that heavily featured Rebel Wilson singing? We may never know. But whatever the reason, ABC has more than likely doomed this show. It feels like we never got the chance to officially "meet" these characters -- and who wants to watch a show filled with characters they don't care about?
If it's any consolation, the show was probably doomed anyway. If advance reviews of the pilot and the quality of the second episode are any indication, "Super Fun Night" is DOA. While television can definitely benefit from more leading ladies who aren't model thin and stereotypically gorgeous, simply having a large woman as your protagonist isn't enough to make your show worth watching. It doesn't help that pretty much every joke Kimmie makes is in reference to her own weight. It's great that she embraces her oversized frame -- but isn't there more to Kimmie than just her body? After all, there are only so many skirt-rippings and pizza jokes and spanx gags we can take in one episode. It's one thing to be self-deprecating. It's entirely another to continue beating a horse long after it's dead.
This would all be bearable if there was anything else about the show worth watching. But from Kimmie's bland best friends to her cartoonish office nemesis, there's no likable or memorable character in sight. The show has a predilection for cutaway jokes, every single one of which falls completely flat. The climactic piano bar showdown between Kimmie and her rival is nothing we haven't seen a thousand times before. It's unclear exactly where this show went wrong, but it's hard not to fault Wilson when she's the producer, the writer and the star. If anything good comes out of this mess of a show, hopefully it proves to be a valuable learning experience for the still-promising young star. Here's hoping "Super Fun Night" dies a Super Quick Death so that Rebel Wilson can move on to better, funnier projects.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WY4My1w3MQ[/youtube]
