Better Late Than Never sends elderly celebs on trip through Asia
Old people! So funny, and without even trying!
As a culture more invested in the inchoate ramblings of teenage pop stars than in the earned wisdom of the early-bird-special class, we find anything outside the imagined norm of the elderly — bad words, motorcycles, sex, shenanigans, high jinks — improbable, unallowable and automatically comedy gold. Thus, your “Grumpy Old Men,” your “The Over-the-Hill Gang,” your classier gerontological comedies like “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” and “Something’s Gotta Give.” How dreary “Downton Abbey” would have been without Maggie Smith and Penelope Wilton not acting their age.
Now here is “Better Late Than Never,” a new reality comedy, which airs Tuesday at 10 p.m. on NBC, in which the unlikely quartet of seniors Henry Winkler, Terry Bradshaw, George Foreman and William Shatner — whom we are meant to regard as the best of chums — go travelling in Asia together. Comic Jeff Dye, in his early 30s, plays their factotum, chaperone, social director and element of contrast.
Based on a highly successful South Korean series called “Grandpas Over Flowers” the series will include visits to Japan (Tokyo, in the opening episode, and Kyo-to); Seoul, South Korea; Hong Kong; and Phuket and Chiang Mai in Thailand.
The principle seems to be to make the show as much like a sitcom or theatrical romp as possible — with Winkler the affable, befuddled nominal leader, Shatner the irascible seeker after new sensations, Bradshaw the bull in the noodle shop and George Foreman as Ringo — and not to discover how these men would actually get on as travelling companions. Or who they really are.
Another form of easy humour “Better Late” offers that of the muddled tourist: the innocent abroad alarmed by the funny ways and foods of foreign lands — not funny or foreign, of course, to the people who live there.
Much supposed hilarity is mined from feeding the travellers parts of animals Americans do not consider food. (“The good thing about me,” says the man whose name is on the George Foreman Grill, “I will eat anything” — as long as he can put some barbecue sauce on it.)
Through the tommy-gun edits, paced to create a sense of Fun! and Excitement!, one gets an occasional glimpse of real people having some form of a real experience and exchanging sincere thoughts. And yet this air of discovery and intimacy — even Shatner, who at a lively 85 is nearly two decades older than Bradshaw and Foreman, announcing his fear of death — is also, in a way, built into the feel-good script.