‘NO’ LAUGHS HERE
New CBS All Access comedy misses the humor mark
SELDOM has a TV series been more appropriately titled than “No Activity.” The first comedy outing from CBS All Access, which had a nice fall with the success of “Star Trek: Discovery” — and renewed “The Good
Fight” for a second season — the show gathers a collection of established goofballs (Tim Meadows, Will Ferrell, Amy Sedaris) and pairs them with younger foils (Nick Brammall, Jesse Plemons, Sunita Mani) in a series of skits loosely set against an attempted drug cartel bust by the San Diego Police department. It’s based on an Australian series of the same name. One suspects something got lost in the translation.
Detectives Tolbeck (Meadows) and Cullen (Brammall, who also starred in the Australian version) are bored out of their skulls waiting for something to happen out on the docks. Dispatch cops Janis (Sedaris) and Fatima (Mani) are not clicking at the precinct. Adrian (Ferrell) and Angus (Plemons) are not doing a great job waiting for the shipment to come in.
The success of the skits depends entirely on the chemistry between the actors. Meadows and Brammall fare best as the mismatched cops, especially in Episode 2 ,when Brammall abandons his partner to the scrutiny of an Internal Affairs officer played by Oscar winner J.K. Simmons, who sits in the back seat of the car and launches into a hilarious monologue about his sexual misadventures on Grindr while Meadows stares ahead in abject horror. It’s the high point of the series.
The ladies get off to a good start as Sedaris, playing the elder of the two dispatchers, puts her younger partner in her place with a quirky bit of workplace slang that clearly marks Sedaris as a mental case to watch. Later on, their rapport is ruined when Sedaris does an unseemly graphic phic monologue about finding ing evidence of her teenage son’s self-pleasuring activities all over the house. Note to comedy writers: we have received your message that women can be as gross as men in discussing bodily fluids, sex, excretion and other formerly “taboo” topics, but the content and the delivery has to be clever to work. That’s not happening here.
Poor Jesse Plemons. The accomplished actor looks like he is pining for those wonderful “Fargo” scripts — and his co-star Kirsten Dunst — when he has to banter, in the pilot, with partner-in-crime Marco (Jason Mantzoukas) about how the bucket they use as a toilet is filled to the brim — and later with Ferrell, who plays his father and describes he and his wife “grunting like two grizzly bears” in the bedroom. One of the parties responsible for the American adaptation of “No Activity” is Funny or Die and here’s a message: Given the choice between “funny” or “die” with this skit, we’d rather pass from this mortal coil than put up with this witless waste of time.
For the most part, “No Activity” plays like one of those “bro” comedies where the guys in charge, entering a superannuated adolescence, hope a hipster veneer will disguise a very lowbrow puerile comic sensibility. It makes “Two and a Half
Men” look like “Frasier.”