After a few rough years, one could make a compelling argument that the broadcast comedy is back. We’ve got an awards juggernaut (ABC’s Abbott Elementary), some reasonably big hits (NBC’s Night Court, CBS’ Ghosts), plus a decent roster of above-average relative newcomers (NBC’s American Auto and Grand Crew, among others). It’s enough to restore your confidence in the format.
What does restored confidence buy you on a practical level? More specifically, how many episodes worth of patience does it buy you when your friendly neighborhood television critic tells you that a new sitcom with a wildly promising cast is doing something interesting, something with actual potential … but that in order to get to that potential, you have to sit through at least three or four episodes I’d (generously) call unamusingly generic and unsteady of tone? Since broadcast TV comedies are good again, do we give the creative team credit for knowing that changes were required and making them? Or, in a world that doesn’t lack for better options, is that too much to ask?
Not Dead Yet
The Bottom Line
Takes four bland episodes to show any potential.
Adapted by David Windsor and Casey Johnson in almost no recognizable way from Alexandra Potter’s novel Confessions of a Forty-Something F**k Up, Not Dead Yet stars Gina Rodriguez as 37-year-old Nell, who had a promising journalistic career at the SoCal Independent, but set everything aside to follow a man to London. Five years later, relationship ended, Nell returns to California and takes the only job available at the paper, writing obituaries. The newspaper is still home to her best friend Sam (Hannah Simone) and presumably second-best friend Dennis (Josh Banday), but it’s now run by the snooty daughter (Lauren Ash’s Lexi) of the publisher.
Nell feels like everybody has moved on and she’s starting over from scratch. She’s a little lonely, drinking a little too much and struggling to find inspiration. Until the guy she’s memorializing (Martin Mull’s jingle writer Monty in the pilot) shows up as a ghost. Soon, spirits are visiting Nell — in a very orderly, one-per-episode line — to help her write, introduce her to new friends and offer her valuable lessons from their lives. Other early ghostly guests include Brittany Snow as an influencer and Mo Collins as a motivational writer.
This sets Not Dead Yet up as a low-stakes workplace comedy entry in the genre of shows in which a protagonist uses a supernatural gift to solve crimes — only in this case it’s more about solving the mysteries of her own life (and how to find a good lede for an obituary). Nell makes her living writing about the dead, but it’s the dead who are going to teach her how to truly live? Yes, it’s possibly a Vocational [Double] Irony Narrative.
My initial instinct was that this would have worked better as an hour-long broadcast dramedy — think Pushing Daisies without the whimsical inspiration, or iZombie minus the zaniness — instead of a single-cam, which leaves everything feeling rushed and thin. While occasionally the episodic guest stars get to do lightly comical things, recognizable punchlines are few and far between, and in a 21-minute format their spectral centrality leaves even less for the supporting cast of scene-stealers. Like, there’s an episode in which Sam teaches Dennis to shoot a miniature basketball, and that’s the B-plot. I haven’t even mentioned the randomness of the new friend Nell meets in the pilot — Angela Gibbs’ Cricket is one of the superficial connections to the book — or Nell’s difficult roommate, played by Rick Glassman, who’s stuck delivering weekly lessons on relating to people on the autism spectrum, which only made me miss Amazon’s As We See It even more.
What’s worse is how little there is for Rodriguez, returning to TV for the first time since her deservedly decorated Jane the Virgin run, to latch onto. She’s pushing too hard to get laughs from nowhere, and the show doesn’t have the time to ground the outlandish things happening to Nell or the personal things that might be driving it all. There’s no instigating event that triggers Nell’s gift, no particular rules, and for three episodes the show can’t decide how seriously we’re supposed to take the fact that our hero sees dead people. Yes, Nell is talking to herself in the middle of a bustling newsroom — though there’s little indication that anybody associated with the show has ever been to a newsroom, especially in 2023 — but there’s no tangible sense that she thinks she’s crazy or that anybody else thinks she’s crazy; there’s just a lot of really unfunny flailing.
Plus, just because the show wants to give the impression that what’s happening is normal workplace behavior, only with ghosts, doesn’t mean it needs to be so completely visually bland. You don’t have to go full Pushing Daisies to give your world a style that in some way captures your show’s story.
Note that Ghosts — which has some narrative similarities — led by focusing on zaniness over any character depth for Rose McIver’s protagonist, and then began, a few episodes in, to explore hints of dramatic depths not through her but through the individual ghosts. This is something Not Dead Yet can’t do because its ghosts arrive for one episode and then they’re gone. While they have superficial wisdom to impart, they’re characters with no wants or needs either. That sort of thing helps with stakes. At the very least, the ghost in Ghosts had a want and need — “Protect our house!” or whatever — from the pilot on.
Just when it would be easy to write Not Dead Yet off as DOA, it decides it wants to take a real interest in the consequences of the thing Nell’s experiencing. With the end of the fourth episode, there’s as abrupt a tone-shifting detour as I’ve seen in a mainstream comedy in years. The fifth episode leans almost entirely into sentiment, and the difference it makes in the scenes of Rodriguez solo and of her with Simone is astonishing. Suddenly, Nell’s talk about how disconnected she feels in her new life hits home. Suddenly, Nell and Sam’s friendship exhibits warmth, as well as the strain of their five-year separation. The fifth episode feels like one of those “This week we’re dealing with real emotions!” episodes of a genre-bending show like Scrubs, except that Scrubs generally had hilarity as a fallback position; Not Dead Yet has a C-story with Lexi learning to appreciate breadsticks.
Ash, incidentally, makes a meal of that breadsticks storyline. The Superstore veteran is the closest the Not Dead Yet cast comes to giving a sitcom-friendly performance, though it isn’t clear yet if that’s good or bad. If the show moves more toward poignancy, with the occasional smile, Simone and Rodriguez’s approaches will be the norm and Ash will stand out as a vestige of a previous show. Or the writers could give Lexi more interiority and less exteriority.
It’s normal for broadcast sitcoms to adapt in their early episodes, but the process usually involves writers getting to know actors and their strengths and playing to them, not transitioning into a completely different show. The evolution of Ghosts has indeed been a process of finding breathing room for members of the vast ensemble to get individual stories — not the writers deciding out of nowhere to become a hardcore home renovation show one month in.
The inevitable question when I say, “It isn’t good, but then it becomes a different show!” is “Is the other show good?” So far, with Not Dead Yet, I can only say that it’s better. But that might not be endorsement enough.
