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Nostalgic
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Adventurous
Choked Up
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The world of streaming comedy has been very good for women comedians looking for projects that adapt to their own unique style and voice. Think of Tig Notaro’s One Mississippi or Maria Bamford’s Lady Dynamite. This month, Amazon Prime’s new TV pilots include Love You More, a half-hour comedy featuring Bridget Everett. The Amazon pilots give audiences a chance to test out which shows they like before some of them are picked up to series. Read on to see if Everett’s bawdy new show is worth loving.
A Guide to Our Rating System
Opening Shot: The opening of a pilot can set a mood for the entire show (think Six Feet Under); thus, we examine the first shot of each pilot.
The Gist: The “who, what, where, when, why?” of the pilot.
Our Take: What did we think? Are we desperate for more or desperate to get that hour back?
Sex and Skin: That’s all you care about anyway, right? We let you know how quickly the show gets down and dirty.
Parting Shot: Where does the pilot leave us? Hanging off a cliff, or running for the hills?
Sleeper Star: Basically, someone in the Damnation cast who is not the top-billed star who shows great promise.
Most Pilot-y Line: Pilots have a lot of work to do: world building, character establishing, and stakes raising. Sometimes that results in some pretty clunky dialogue.
Our Call: We’ll let you know if you should, ahem, Stream It or Skip It.
LOVE YOU MORE
Opening Shot: Karen (Everett) sits alone at a bar at closing time, ignoring the come-one of a teeny would-be suitor in favor of a beefier slab of meat. But when Mr. Slab turns out to be into the scatalogical, Karen goes home with Mr. Teeny, who ends up being short of stature but long of dong. It’s a scene that communicates a lot — what a jungle it is out there for Karen, both because she’s a big woman and because men are freaks; the irreverent and raunchy tone of the series — and with Heart’s “Barracuda” on the soundtrack to boot.
The Gist: Karen is a single woman and works a counselor at a group home for young adults with Down syndrome. The pilot suggests a series that would partly be about Karen’s work life and partly about her personal life. If you’re at all familiar with Everett’s comedy, it comes as no surprise that Karen’s dating life is unapologetically sexual and purposefully provocative. Karen is, as she describes herself in the show’s opening minutes, a “big girl,” and she’s negotiating a world that is not prepared to celebrate her body type.
There’s a Broad City flavor to Love You More in the way that Karen’s dating life is a disaster, painting the world as fundamentally insane, even though Karen is an endearing mess herself. Her professional life is nominally more structured, and Karen’s warm but weary relationship with the kids at the home yields some of the show’s best, most disarming moments.
And in what will likely set the show apart from the glut of television we’re currently swimming in, the show takes occasional breaks from reality where Karen gets to perform in Everett’s characteristic bawdy cabaret style.
Our Take: Bridget Everett had been one of the best kept secrets in the comedy and cabaret worlds until appearances on Inside Amy Schumer put her on the TV and movie radar. Since then, she’s been on TV shows like Lady Dynamite and films like recent indies Patti Cake$ and Fun Mom Dinner. On Love You More, her comedic brashness is on full display. As ever, she lands a lot of laughs with her physical comedy, but the show makes sure to keep Karen as a character and not just a delivery system for a pair of boobs designed to make men uncomfortable. There’s a bra-shopping scene that walks just such a tightrope. Her work at the home for Down Syndrome teens feels deliberately lived-in and free of ginned-up dramatics, but it’s also by far the best and most interesting stuff in the pilot. The cast of characters in the Jane Berger House are varied, distinct, and endearing, and Everett’s performance is free of condescension. The first-episode storyline is handled with sensitivity but not preciousness. There can be a tendency for comedies dealing with Down Syndrome or special-needs kids to make them extra inappropriate in an effort to treat them just like everyone else. That approach often feels like protesting too much. Love You More is smart enough to know that merely taking these characters and their stories seriously and honestly puts them way ahead. Not to mention that it gives a great platform for actors Luke Zimmerman (The Secret Life of the American Teenager) and Jamie Brewer (American Horror Story), both of whom do excellent work in the pilot.
By comparison, the dating horror stories in the rest of the episode are pretty well-worn territory (Karen is fooling around with a married Aussie waiter, much to the chagrin of her gay best friend). It will be a challenge for Everett, showrunner Michael Patrick King (Sex and the City) and director Bobcat Goldthwait to make Karen’s dating foibles as interesting/surprising as her work life.
Sex and Skin: Oh my, yes. The sex scene that follows the opening at last call is the kind of jump-cut-to-sweaty-fucking gag that gets used a lot, but you do end up getting a real eyeful of a big ol’ penis. There’s also a whole musical number about “titties” of all sizes that culminates with a dead-on shot of Everett fully topless. Don’t expect this show to be at all coy about nudity.
Parting Shot: After coming to an understanding with one of the Berger House kids, Karen punches out for the day, loosens up her bra, and heads out into the city, to the strains of Everett herself on the soundtrack, singing “Smoke on the Water.”
Sleeper Star: There’s a lot of promise in the fun, banter-y work friendship between Karen and Raquel, played by Karen Pittman, but we’re actually going to go with the big casting coup for Love You More: sitcom legend Loni Anderson (WKRP in Cincinnati) as Karen’s older roommate, Jean. Karen’s distant and resentful of her roomie for a while, and Jean is certainly peculiar, with her overt cheeriness for no discernable reason. But once again, the show opts for empathy when it could easily go for evisceration, and Karen ends up seeing a kindred misfit in Jean.
Most Pilot-y Line: It’s a remarkably non-pilot-y pilot, but the scene with Karen and her gay best friend Louis gets awfully expedient setting up the Simon character. “Simon? The married waiter who you’re fucking, that Simon?” We got it. Simon.
Our Call: Stream It! Bridget Everett is a singular comedic talent, and here she gets to show off a disarmingly empathetic persona in equal measure to big production numbers about titties.
