There’s something depressing in watching talented comedians struggle to get laughs from weak screenwriting. This repeatedly happens in the first three-to-four episodes of Hulu’s “Reboot,” a show with a great cast and even a clever idea but faulty comic timing and clichéd joke writing. The show occasionally sparks through the sheer skill level of its cast, and it improves in the back half of the season as they’re likely allowed to have more input than in the shockingly flat setup episodes, but this is still a bizarre misfire, a program that satirizes the TV industry and the egos of the actors who allow it to function in a way that feels scared to take actual risks or develop actual characters. At its core, it’s about a program within a program that’s being pushed and pulled between old-fashioned comedy and a more progressive brand of humor, and there’s a meta reading of “Reboot” itself wherein it’s doing the exact same thing. This is interesting on paper. Sadly, that doesn’t make it funny.
READ MORE: Fall 2022 TV Preview: Over 45 Series To Watch
Hannah (Rachel Bloom) is the edgy young writer who finds herself in the offices of a Hulu executive looking for a new hit (the meta starts instantly). She has an unexpected pitch, a reboot of the multi-camera comedy “Step Right Up,” an early 2000s hit that looks a bit like a slightly more modern “Full House,” one of several shows that the executive assistants in that meeting with Hannah point out has been successfully launched for a new generation. Hannah wants to take the cheesy concept of “Step Right Up” and dig into it with a more adult approach, but she starts to face roadblocks almost immediately, many of them put up by the show’s original creator Gordon (a series-MVP Paul Reiser) and a writer’s room torn between the cheesy jokes that originally made the show a hit and the more intellectual tone that Hannah first imagined.
The cast of “Step Right Up” hasn’t exactly been setting the world on fire since the show was canceled. Reed Sterling (Keegan-Michael Key) tried to turn his sitcom success into a dramatic career, but no one would take him seriously after seeing him do pratfalls to a laugh track. Bree Marie Jensen (Judy Greer) went off and married a foreign aristocrat but seems terminally dissatisfied with wherever she is in life. Clay Barber (Johnny Knoxville) lived up to his bad-boy image with a few run-ins with the law. And son Zack (Calum Worthy) seems stuck in the perpetual adolescence that often derails child stars, including still having his mom on set. They all really need “Step Right Up” to be a hit again, and they’ll have to deal with their own personality clashes off-set while dodging interference from a Hulu official (the charming Krista Marie Yu) and the stunt casting of a reality TV star (Alyah Chanelle Scot) from a show called “F**k Boy Island.”
If you’re wondering how all of these comedy talents ended up at “Reboot,” it was likely the pull of Steven Levitan, an undeniably successful comedy creator who took the cast of “Modern Family” and made them household names. There are times when it feels like Levitan is riffing on his time in the network comedy scene—a joke about too many Chuck Lorre shows later in the season, for example, feels kind of personal. And the show often has the structure of “Modern Family,” pushing characters off into duos with competing subplots. It has some of that show’s flaws, too, in that the storytelling lacks the stakes that one would expect with this setup. It’s a streaming show—and reminds viewers of that with profanity and nudity—but it has the soul of a network sitcom, a structure in which problems arise, are solved in around half an hour, and forgotten by the next credit sequence. Yes, there are some subplots that flow from episode to episode, but more of them have that neat-and-tidy structure that you would think a show like this would avoid.
The truth is that “Reboot” often seems to purposefully sidestep chances for character-driven humor. The writers have a habit of hitting the archetypes of their characters so often that the actors aren’t allowed to do anything else. Multiple episodes into the season, we don’t know much about Reed beyond his ego or Bree beyond her insecurity—and the latter is pretty archaic in terms of gender roles, falling again into jokes about older actresses who wear Spanx or don’t know what Cameo is. “Reboot” is constantly going for easy jokes when it has a cast who knows how to nail the hard ones.
Now, they do start to find ways to transcend the awkward clichés of the setup episodes through sheer force of will as the season goes on. Reiser is particularly phenomenal, using his experience in the sitcom game in a way that feels more like clever background for his character instead of an easy joke aimed at the industry that helped make him a star. There are funny supporting performances that pop up, especially in a writer’s room that increasingly steals the show after a trio of “older” comedy writers (including Fred Melamed) join the young newcomers in a sort of sitcom generational battle. Again, the Levitan name draws talent, and even the cameo roles make that clear.
To that end, “Reboot” is an interesting reminder that while a comedy show is only as good as its writing, there’s always potential if the cast works. There have been so many comedies over the years in which it took the writer’s room even a full season, sometimes, to figure out how to write to their performers, and it does feel like that’s what’s happening as this show progresses. With so many clichés out of the way, it’s incredibly easy to see “Reboot” finally coming into comedy shape in future seasons with a cast like this. It wouldn’t be the first comedy to do so. Only time will tell if “Reboot” can find a stronger voice before everyone shuts this one down again and searches for the next comedy classic to bring back to life. [C]
