Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Perfect Harmony’ On NBC, Where Bradley Whitford Tries To Help Anna Camp’s Church Choir Reach Their Potential

It’s been almost exactly 20 years since Bradley Whitford started his breakout TV role as Josh Lyman on The West Wing. Since that show ended, he’s been in an endless string of series that, whether they did well or not, were always fun to watch, mainly because of his presence (yes, even Studio 60… sometimes). But he certainly hasn’t had a hit that came even close to WW. Can his newest show, Perfect Harmony, at least get a second season?

PERFECT HARMONY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Arthur Cochran (Bradley Whitford) sits in his car outside the Second First Church of the Cumberlands, looking at the program from his wife’s funeral. He talks drunkenly to himself, saying how much bad taste his wife had, especially in husbands, and the fact that she stranded him in Kentucky.

The Gist: It certainly seems like Arthur, a former music professor from Princeton University, is looking to end it all. He asks his deceased wife to give him a sign that he should keep going; right as he’s about to down a bottle of pills, he hears a clanging rendition of “The Hallelujah Chorus” from the church. “This will not be the last thing I hear on earth.”

He immediately goes in and corrects everything everyone in the choir is doing, from how the “piano girl” slides into her notes, to how one of the singer’s pronounces the “Hal” part of “Hallelujah”. After making all the corrections, the group suddenly sings as one, and they want Arthur to stick around to help them in the upcoming choir competition.

The group from this small church is led by Ginny (Anna Camp), a harried almost-single mother who tries to see the positive side of life; her husband Wayne (Will Greenberg), a moron that Ginny doesn’t have the heart to divorce, making him think he has a chance to get her back; Dwayne (Geno Segers), a big baritone who has always had a crush on Ginny; Adams (Tymberlee Hill), who thinks she’s a better singer than she is; and Reverend Jax (Rizwan Manji), whose upbringing was so sheltered that he knows movies and shows by what his parents said was wrong with them.

He’s reluctant to do it until he meets the toupeed pastor of the local megachurch (John Carroll Lynch), who rejected Arthur’s request for a plot in his ceremony. He then is determined to beat him. When Ginny praises the lord for Arthur changing his mind he says “I’m doing this out of spite,” to which she replies, “God works in strange ways!”

Arthur gets them to sing to their potential, but also elicits some honesty out of them, including how Dwayne wants to “bone” Ginny, which starts a fight with Wayne. Ginny boots him from the church, but when Ginny’s son Cash (Spencer Allport) comes to the houseboat Arthur lived in while tending to his dying wife, he learns that he’s getting into fights in school because he’s being made fun of for his inability to read correctly. He finds out Cash is dyslexic, and lets Ginny know.

The night of the competition, Ginny brings Arthur and asks the group to let him lead them again. And when they get on stage, they put in a surprisingly good performance, mashing up “The Hallelujah Chorus” with “Eye of the Tiger.”

Our Take: Like its fellow Thursday NBC rookie series Sunnyside, Perfect Harmony is about a guy who needs to redeem himself reluctantly leading a ragtag group who need the help. Whitford is an executive producer, along with Jason Winer (Modern Family), Adam Anders (Glee) and Lesley Wake Webster (Speechless, Life In Pieces). Wake Webster is the creator and showrunner, and the story is mostly inspired by her experiences in church choirs while growing up in Kentucky.

This execution of the “one person leads the ragtag ensemble” trope isn’t quite as successful as Sunnyside, mainly because Whitford’s Arthur is a cynical Yankee intellectual who is chagrined that his wife chose to die in her home state, and now he’s stuck. There isn’t much of a background to why he’s stuck, but the assumption is that he resigned or retired to move to Kentucky in his wife’s last months. Anyway, even though he needs as much help as the folks in the choir do, you know that his character will — at least at first — have a bit of a sense of superiority over the small-town folks he’s directing in the choir.

Of course, some of that will bite him in the ass, like when Adams doesn’t give him a biscuit from her diner because he called her “Whitney Houston” when he busted in the night before. She got the snide reference and didn’t appreciate it. So until Arthur really gets to know the group, that back and forth will be there. Not that dynamic can’t be funny — when he nails Ginny’s situation in a monologue, she says, “Have you been reading my diary?” to which he replies, “I wrote it.” — but it feels like an easy source of laughs in the early going.

Whitford and Camp, of course, make Perfect Harmony sing, pun intended. His cynical Arthur and her sunny-side Ginny complement each other, and you know that the two headline stars of this show are going to be the main relationship everyone looks to, whether that turns out to be close friends (we hope) or romantic partners (we hope not). Once the rest of the ensemble’s characters deepen a bit, the show should settle into a nice groove. But we’re not sure it’ll have time to get there.

Sex and Skin: Nothing here.

Parting Shot: After the choir shows well at the competition, they come into Arthur’s houseboat and start feeding him, giving him clothing advice, and spraying deodorant on him. “If you didn’t want company, you picked the wrong group to be friends with,” says Ginny. “Yes, we’re loving but pushy,” says Jax, “Like Mary Poppins in the Disney classic, Unmarried Women Cause Trouble.” “God help me,” says Arthur.

Sleeper Star: We liked Segers as Dwayne, a big guy with a heart so big that, after Arthur encourages him to go for it with Ginny in order to open up his voice, he brings balloons that say “DATE ME” to her house and serenades her.

Most Pilot-y Line: We thought Lynch’s character, which we don’t even know will be around beyond the pilot, had a name. But we re-watched the pilot and noticed that his name was never uttered. Either that’s on purpose, or it’s pretty damn sloppy. We’re not sure which.

Our Call: STREAM IT. There was more than enough in the Perfect Harmony pilot to recommend it, but this show has the potential to get really unfunny, really fast, especially if Whitford’s character continues to be a smug SOB.

Your Call:

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Perfect Harmony On NBC.com