New Reiser comedy worth a look

The Paul Reiser Show opened last week, straightforward enough, with actor Paul Reiser talking to the camera about having been the male lead in “Mad About You” some years ago.

He recounted his experience with a fan on the street who remembered him as having been on “that show” with “that girl,” and oh, how she loved that show. And how Reiser looks exactly the same, except maybe he’s a little fatter.

Reiser – in the story that opens “The Paul Reiser Show,” the semi-scripted situation comedy loosely modeled on his life – now finds himself without an occupation to list on his son’s school form under “father’s occupation.”

He doesn’t want to put “actor” because as he says he hasn’t done that in years. Instead he takes part in an outing with other dads – not friends, he says; at some point, guys don’t really make their own friends. They’re just husbands of their wives’ friends and “your kid goes to school with my kid” friends, that sort of thing.

Anyway this group of acquaintances through some means or another – who say “friends” because it’s easier – are trying to put their kids’ school projects together. It’s probably not terribly surprising that one of them ends up glued to the car of another one of them because this is television and if nothing happened it would be boring and no one would watch.

But the show is so directly modeled on the HBO comedy “Curb Your Enthusiasm” that Larry David, star of the HBO production, makes an appearance as both a friend of Paul Reiser – I suppose on some level we as viewers assume every big-shot network actor is a friend of every other one so we don’t even question this – and as a rival for a new gig Reiser is trying out for, hosting a game show called “Start Thinking.”

Which, when Reiser was trying out for it – they left it way up in the air whether he would agree to host this game show or not (guest star Mark Burnett was totally pushing for it) – the show did nothing but irritate him. a) The “contestants” were dumb as rocks, and 2) by off-screen judges’ ruling the questions didn’t need legitimate answers. Reiser openly wished there was someone involved with the project who would, in fact, “start thinking.” Then there was the fact that they had his random friends – well, acquaintances, really – as the focus group voting on how he did, and all of them naturally gave him high marks.

So Reiser is actually upset by having this job all but foisted upon him – not least of which because, in his conversation with Larry David, both of them went from sort of wanting the job to being so far above the job that now they couldn’t believe the other was even being considered for it in the first place. But he gets a call from his son, who says something adorable and he determines that what is meant to go in the space marked “Father’s occupation” is “father.” Which the other dads, still smarting by the failure of their kids’ school projects (as done by them) take as a personal slam against their parenting. Darn it, he just can’t win.

So that’s “The Paul Reiser Show,” a half-hour of Paul Reiser in a semi-scripted situation comedy about a marginally employed actor and his friends and family and assorted encounters with guest stars – a sort of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” without all the swears. I feel like I should sound more enthusiastic about this, but really, it seems like it’s actually the perfect speed for Thursday night and what the heck, it’s Paul Reiser.

Watch it. You might enjoy it.

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Sometimes you just can’t put the band back together

By NATHAN IRWIN

So, Paul Reiser is back on television. Wow, is it 1996 again?

For the benefit of our younger readers: Back in the early '90s, standup comedians roamed the TV airwaves like so many omnivorous dinosaurs. Anyone who could pull of two successful gigs at The Laugh Shack was immediately handed a contract for a primetime network sitcom. Seinfeld? Check. Roseanne Barr? Check. Tim Allen, Ellen DeGeneres, Margaret Cho? Check, check and (God help us) check. Then, just as the dinosaurs were laid low by global climate change, so too did the comic-driven sitcom meet extinction at the hands of the ensemble-cast police procedural.

Into this miasma of televised dross, Paul Reiser lobbed one small shard of an original idea, in the form of “Mad About You,” the sitcom he created and (with Helen Hunt) starred in. “Mad About You” was neither a will-they-or-won’t-they romantic comedy (a la “Cheers”), nor a Cosby-inflected fantasia on all-American familial bliss. Rather, the show set out to explore the neglected middle ground of American life: that brief interlude between marriage and parenthood. Armed with this single premise, and the spot-on comedic chops of Hunt and Reiser, the show put out three or four good seasons, followed by a few not-so-good seasons. Eventually, it fell victim to a parade of gimmick guest starts, Very Special Episodes, and the inevitable plotline of pregnancy, childbirth, and parenthood. It stumbled to the finish line, and promptly disappeared, turning up occasionally in the syndicated-programming blocs of many mid-market local affiliate stations.

Now, Reiser has resurfaced with a new show, but regrettably, with nothing new to say. In “The Paul Reiser Show,” he stars as… well, Paul Reiser, a onetime television personality now comfortably ensconced in middle age, marital bliss and paternal devotion. Stealing a page from the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” playbook, the real-life Reiser has cast actress Amy Landecker as his fictional wife, and a cadre of actor-comedians as his fictional friends and neighbors.

As an unabashed fan of the earlier series, I wanted very much to like the new show. And on first blush, Reiser seems to make that possible. He is older now, since we last met: More paunchy about the middle, with thinner and grayer hair. I can, alas, relate all too easily. He has also settled into a tamer, more subdued, comfortable domesticity – to which I as well must plead a timid “guilty.” And his distinctive quirks, tics and mannerisms are all on display in full force. But, sometimes you just can’t put the band back together again. “The Paul Reiser Show” is sadly derivative of any number of its predecessors, and brings no new twist to the formula. Reiser’s co-stars here don’t stand out quite as vividly as Hunt did twenty years ago. And the show’s real and fictional elements stand awkwardly at odds with one another: The punch of the real-life Reiser’s dialogue only calls attention to the formulaic lines scripted for his fellow actors.

The debt to “Curb Your Enthusiasm” is most keenly felt in a scene between Reiser and that show’s creator, Larry David. David, like Reiser, appears as himself, and the scene has some of the spontaneity, the frenzy and the glorious improvisational free-fall that characterized the earlier show. The two comedians and friends play off one another brilliantly, hinting at the kind of show Reiser might have created, had he more courage. Instead, he has played it safe, and delivered a much less interesting product to the viewer.