Pilot

Ad men Sam and Tim crash a business lunch, getting a chance to make an ad pitch to Chrysler.

This pilot was like the meal I had at Sala Thai in 1995 – there were things I had an immediate reaction to and ideas that only occurred to me upon reflection.

I mostly liked the show from the point when Sam and Tim crash the business lunch through the spit-balling session culminating in their trying to break their own office window. I laughed out loud at Sam and Tim dabbing sauce on their clothes and brandishing a random receipt to "prove" they had just happened to be eating in the same restaurant where the Chrysler exec was holding his meeting with a Chicago ad agency, the elderly receptionist (confusing Tim with his father) bending over "provocatively" to pick up her pencil, and the Hot Tub King ad.

I didn't care for the random shots of Detroit (which, being a lifelong Detroiter, I tend to find distracting in a "Hey! I know where that is" sort of way), Mort Crim commenting on the Hot Tub King ad, Sam and Tim sitting by the Ambassador Bridge cheering the trucks as they go by, or the Hot Tub King's epiphany. If that was intended to feel awkward, congratulations.

However, there were ideas that I didn't immediately pick up on until the day after I watched the pilot, such as Tim's father, the founder of the ad agency, now being literally a "madman" and cracking the "unbreakable" office window representing Sam and Tim achieving the unattainable goal of securing the Chrysler account.

The show has ideas and themes, but they may have gotten scrambled by some extraneous stuff. Maybe the pilot would have been better if it had been a little longer and split into two parts (part one ending with the Chrysler exec stumbling out of the woods and part two opening with the hospital scene, Sam and Tim watching the Hot Tub King ad, or the Hot Tub King's epiphany) or left as one part and some of the shots of Detroit (like the drive past Comerica Park) being deleted and the Hot Tub King's epiphany pushed back an episode. There's a disconnect between Sam and Tim's trying to break the office window and Sam's dream board.

Not a particularly strong start, but good enough that I will probably watch at least one more episode, which is more of a shot than I gave 2 Broke Girls or Workaholics.

This tightly written and tightly edited pilot burns gives more bang for its 23-minutes than any other Comedy Central comedy in recent memory. The lead characters of Sam and Tim are fun to watch but the secondary characters introduced throughout the episode give hint to a wider and exciting world for the leads to play in. Jason Sudeikis guest stars as a fairly straightforward executive, an easy role given past characters he's played. Shawntay Dalon only appears for the last two minutes of the episode but there's a lot to look forward to both in her marriage to Tim and a nasty rivalry with their next door neighbor, her brother and Tim's best friend Sam. While the set up for the show (Tim's inherited an ad business from his aging father, Sam is his best friend) is a bit of a thin premise, describing post-industrial Detroit is something American audiences have been missing in their sitcom experience of the world.