CBS comedies match characters from two worlds
CBS has two sitcoms to put on your new sitcom list. Each concerns what happens when a person or persons move next to or in with dissimilar persons. In each case, one party is black and the other white; race is a subject in one show.
In the weightless “Happy Together,” Damon Wayans Jr. and Amber Stevens West play Jake and Claire, a couple in their early 30s who take in a hot Australian pop star named Connor (Felix Mallard) when a tabloid breakup sends him looking for a place to hide. (Jake is his accountant.)
Although it is based on the real-life experience of executive producer Ben Winston, in whose attic One Direction singer Harry Styles (since gone solo, also an executive producer) lived for 18 months, it’s a familiar king-among-commoners theme.
The main effect of Cooper’s presence is to make Jake and Claire feel old and proclaim that they are not, although they have settled into a comfortable couch-bound, bingewatching, snack-eating Saturday-night groove. Jake, especially, is concerned with looking cool to Cooper, which he does not accomplish by saying weird things in funny voices. Cooper, for his part, likes that Jake is “an ordinary guy, living an ordinary life in a totally ordinary place.”
Nothing particularly interesting is done with the premise; Jake and Claire go out clubbing with Cooper, and it destroys them; Cooper puts them on a popstar health regimen. Wayans and West develop a comfortable rapport as the episodes go on, and West is enjoyable all the way through, funny without breathing hard.
“The Neighborhood” is more substantial: It has more characters, and a splendid set representing the facade and yards of two side-by-side Southern California Craftsman bungalows feels less like a multi-camera sitcom than legitimate theater. It has political points, about diversity and unity, preservation and gentrification, that are simultaneously emphasized and danced around. Stripped to its essentials, it’s a familiar comedy about a person who would like to be left alone and the person who won’t leave him alone.
Max Greenfield plays Dave Johnson, a professional conflict mediator moving his family from a small town in Michigan into a predominantly black neighborhood in Pasadena; his wife, Gemma (Beth Behrs), has a job running a progressive school nearby.
Their soon-tobe-neighbor Calvin Butler (Cedric the Entertainer), meanwhile, associating the name Johnson with Magic, has been happily expecting “another successful black family moving into that nice house” next door. His awakening is rude.
“You let one family like that move in,” Calvin declares, “and the next thing you know, it’s going to be a bunch of dudes jogging around in their little short shorts walking their vegan Labradoodles.”
The premise is a flip, of course, on the old cry of the Racist White Homeowner, “There goes the neighborhood,” unleashing jokes and a speech or two about how black people are, and white people are, and how they see each other. But this is also a TV neighborhood, where the “community” extends no farther than the people next door — not even the people next door on the other side.