Viewers should pivot from ‘Pivoting’
How do I put this gently? “Pivoting” (8:30 p.m. Sunday, Fox, TV-14) is about as unfunny and contrived a sitcom as I’ve seen. And I have been writing a TV column since the end of the last century.
You don’t have to be “old school” to find this dreadful. After the death of their best friend, three women in their early 40s vow to seize the day.
Amy (Eliza Coupe), a producer of a Long Island cooking show, resolves to stop avoiding domestic life and actually pay attention to her children. Jodie (Ginnifer Goodwin), a mother of three, including a teen she suspects of being sexually active, begins to confront her true feelings about an unfulfilling sex life with her husband by losing weight and developing a crush on her new trainer. Sarah (Maggie Q), a harried surgeon, throws caution to the winds and decides to throw away a medical career and work as a bagger at the local supermarket.
There have been more far-fetched premises for a sitcom, but few accompanied by such trite and strenuously unnatural dialogue. While attending their friend’s funeral, the ladies actually get into an extended riff about their prom — as if they’ve developed nothing else to discuss in the last 20-plus years.
The whole venture screams: “How do we sanitize ‘Sex and the City’ for a network audience? And fail miserably?”
The arrival of COVID, besieged hospitals and a real health care crisis facing doctors and nurses adds a level of insensitive cluelessness to Sarah’s already preposterous storyline. But that’s not a fatal flaw for “Pivoting.” This show emerged dead on arrival.
“Pivoting” and “Call Me Kat” will air regularly on Thursday nights. ›
The Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block (midnight Sunday/early Monday, TV-14) has a new entry, “Smiling Friends,” completely in keeping with the showcase’s oddball philosophy. In these 11-minute shorts, employees of Smiling Friends, a philanthropic institution, set about comforting strangers with particular problems.
Cheerful Pim (Michael Cusack) is some kind of bug-eyed creature with a single hair emerging from his skull. For reasons unknown, Pim speaks in a Down Under accent. His lazy partner, Charlie (Zach Hadel), is an all-American dude.
Their first assignment is bringing joy to Mr. Frog, a dyspeptic and angry cartoon amphibian whose actions, insults and violence have seen him canceled from his hit TV show. In its short running time, the series opener manages to explore cancel culture, the weird TV habit of “replacing” a character at the center of a series and the weird trajectory of Pepe the Frog, the comic character who became an international symbol of the alt-right.
The tone here is “SpongeBob” meets “Flight of the Conchords” by way of “BoJack Horseman.” “Smiling Friends” offers a menagerie of amphibians, crustaceans and the random human, interacting in ways that are certain to generate the kind of nervous laughter “Adult Swim” fans have come to expect.
› Speaking of shows that have moved on after canceling their title character, John Goodman (“Roseanne,” “The Conners”) returns in “The Righteous Gemstones” (10 p.m. Sunday, HBO, TV-MA). Now entering its second season after a long hiatus, “Gemstones” stars Goodman as Eli Gemstone, the patriarch of a grifting Evangelical empire. But the series really belongs to Danny McBride as Jesse, his firstborn son, a bad boy who still sees himself as Eli’s rightful heir.
In this season opener, Eli’s story looks back to his past as a professional wrestler in a low-rent ring out of Memphis, where he padded his income as an enforcer for a local loan shark.
Jesse then looks ahead, contemplating a partnership with a Houston megachurch powerhouse, helmed by an Evangelical power couple (Eric Andre and Jessica Lowe) whose frantic Sunday gatherings resemble heavy metal concerts.