Don’t impeach ‘Mr. Mayor’ just yet
soon raised — in a flashback news report, there are masks and a slightly distasteful joke about a remote learning app — and quickly dispatched with the line, “Dolly Parton bought everyone a vaccine.” So that’s over.
On the basis of the two episodes available to review, “Mr. Mayor” is fine; given the talent on both sides of the camera, I expect it to get better. It’s a high bar the creators have set, to be sure.
There is as yet no figure as grandly eccentric or eccentrically grand as those played by Tracy Morgan and Jack Mcbrayer on “30 Rock” or Tituss Burgess and Carol Kane on “Kimmy Schmidt,” or by Jane Krakowski on both.
Bobby Moynihan’s disheveled “interim communications director” Jayden Kwapis — who wears prescription sandals because of
“podiatric claustrophobia” and mistakes Bremer’s daughter for his wife (“It is very confusing in L.A.”) — does possess some promising bigness.
But Vella Lovell as Mikaela Shaw, who as Bremer’s campaign manager “made that old white man seem cogent and cool” and is now “the first woman of color without a master’s degree to serve as chief of staff, hashtag ‘progress,’ hashtag ‘one filter,’” needs more definition. Mike Cabellon, as “chief strategist” Tommy Tomás, has even less.
Conversely, there is Holly Hunter’s Arpi Meskimen, whom we meet as a “super-liberal” councilwoman representing “East Hollywood, Little Bangladesh and the Hollywood Forever Cemetery” and who would like to get rid of Bob’s Big Boy (the statue, not the coffee shop) because “it whitewashes the labor force and gives me sexual nightmares.” Her character is so insistent an antagonist that she seems a little isolated from the rest of the cast. These things can change — and likely will.
But already there is Danson, a boyish 73, and having, as he seems always to have, the time of his life. If there were a Mt. Rushmore of Television Comedians, his face could be carved on it four times. (Obviously, we would need a bigger Mt. Rushmore.)
Coming almost straight out of “The Good Place,” he is on similar ground as a decent sort finding his footing in a new job and a little slow about some of what he finds there. (“He thinks Santa Monica is part of Los Angeles,” Mikaela sniffs). But Danson has found his light and is waiting comfortably in it for the rest of the show to catch up. I can wait, too.