In the US: Tuesdays, 9/8c, NBC
Do you miss 30 Rock? Do you miss a Tina Fey-produced, screwball NBC comedy set behind the scenes of the world of television, perhaps even one written by Tracey Wigfield, who won an Emmy for her writing on 30 Rock?
Really? Uh huh. Okay, that’s interesting. No reason in particular I’m asking, really. Just a bit of a random questioning straight out of the blue, there. Bit odd of me, huh?
Meanwhile, on a completely unrelated topic, blasting onto our screens we have Great News which is a bit like that lovely movie The Intern, in that it sees a golden oldie mummy (My Big Fat Greek Wedding‘s Andrea Martin) deciding after the death of one of her friends to follow her dream by starting a new career. Coincidentally, that career is in TV journalism, just like her daughter’s (Ground Floor/Undateable‘s Briga Heelan). Even more coincidentally, she ends up as an intern in Heelan’s workplace, a New Jersey TV news show, where the already blurred boundaries between the mother and daughter’s lives become even more blurred.
Ha, ha. Fooled you. All those questions at the beginning weren’t random at all. I was talking about Great News there, too! Wasn’t I cunning?
Indeed, Great News feels like one of those “format sells” to Germany, where a show gets remade more or less identically, except with a slightly different setting and a completely new cast. Some of the characters get changed a bit, some of the dialogue gets moved from one character to another, but otherwise everything stays the same. And in English, this time.
Nevertheless, despite the huge amount of overlap between the shows in terms of writing and cast, Great News not only still feels fresh, it also remains funny, with joke following joke like machine gun fire. Not every joke hits, but they frequently do and are invariably very funny.
The format also mixes up the targets of the jokes. Whereas 30 Rock was all Liz Lemon’s efforts to keep an insane black man and a narcissistic woman happy, giving us both racial and gender comedy, here the jokes are largely generational as well as familial. We have Heelan and Martin’s mother-daughter relationship, lending itself to a lot of comedy about female neuroses; Martin’s age also lends itself to jokes about oldies’ abilities, both positive and negative.
On top of that, the stars of the show-within-the-show are a narcissistic aging white male newscaster (John Michael Higgins) and a terminally hip and stupid younger white female newscaster (the surprisingly good Nicole Richie). It’s largely Martin’s job to deal with Higgins, Heelan having to deal with Richie’s idiocy (“How about we do our piece about Snapchap… on Snapchap?”) while trying to advance the cause of serious journalism and her own career.
The Alec Baldwin of the piece is boss Adam Campbell (Harper’s Island), who’s both a potential love interest and a frequent foil for Heelan. And as he’s English, there are naturally jokes about that, too (“You Benedict Arnold!” “Benedict Arnold was the only one who wasn’t a traitor in that war!”).
I found the first two episodes to be both frequently laugh-out loud funny and actually funnier than the first episodes of 30 Rock itself, lacking the dramatic lulls that show did while it found its feet. Martin’s obviously a hugely powerful and funny force, but Heelan’s one of the few younger actresses who could hold her own against Martin and up for physical comedy as well – it’s good to see her finally be the star of a show at last. The show isn’t especially subtle, and no one’s holding back with the acting, but it’s frequently subtle in its unsubtlety (“Coming next – the hidden danger in your household’s gun collection”), and the humour and performances often have odd beats that feel improvised, giving them more interest than normal.
My humour’s a bit odd, but I think if you liked 30 Rock as much as I did, then I think you’ll like Great News, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBnlC7oOxk4?rel=0
