“Mr. Mayor” is jarringly flat
“Mr. Mayor” has good sitcom DNA: Robert Carlock and Tina Fey of “30 Rock” and “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” on the writing and producing side; Ted Danson, most recently of “The Good Place” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” on screen. What could go wrong?
Yet something did, at least on the basis of the new NBC comedy’s first two episodes. That’s a very small sample, but it’s what we have, and it’s a jarringly flat 42 minutes of television.
No blame goes to Danson, who strides through the role of Neil Bremer, newly elected and largely unqualified mayor of Los An- geles, with his typical aplomb. Bremer has the charismatic lunkheadedness and chummy-needy temperament Danson has brought to characters from Michael, the afterlife architect of “The Good Place,” all the way back to Sam Malone in “Cheers.”
There are moments when Danson reacts to a laugh line from one of Bremer’s aides — a pair of slick, young, neurotically woke apparatchiks (Vella Lovell and Mike Cabellon) and a rumpled white guy (Bobby Moynihan of “Saturday Night Live”) who is given to outsmarting them — with a blank stare. It’s because Bremer, played by the 73-yearold Danson, doesn’t get it. But in your head you may hear Danson,
Ted Danson as Mayor Neil Bremer, left, and Bobby Moynihan as Jayden Kwapis in a scene from the new comedy “Mr. Mayor.” along with the rest of us, asking: “Seriously? That’s the best you could come up with?”
So far, the show is full of lines that are meant to be funny, in a joke-adjacent kind of way, but don’t quite hit — they have the shape of humor but not the force. Most of these are predicated on a continual but uneasy satire of the current climate of political correctness; “Mr. Mayor” takes on cancel culture as one of its main subjects, and perhaps it does it as directly as you can on prime-time network TV, but the overall effect is of writers boldly tiptoeing.
It starts to feel like a receiving line: We meet the pronoun joke (“The look in his eyes — their eyes — a lot of different eyes”);
the me-too joke (“If you believe in something, don’t give up, don’t take no for answer, except for with sex, that’s different”); the cleverly inverted race joke (“You need to learn how to listen, whitey.” “Whitey?” “Your hair”).
But Bremer isn’t soulless or venal or particularly Machiavellian, in the mode of Alec Baldwin’s TV executive on “30
Rock.” He’s more of an earnest blunderer who ran for mayor to make his daughter (Kyla Kenedy) think he was cool.
And that’s not the only note of sentimentality in “Mr. Mayor” — there’s an “aww” vibe to the father-daughter relationship and to Bremer’s jousting with a political rival, a progressive hardcase played by Holly Hunter.