Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Crew’ On Netflix, Where Kevin James Leads A NASCAR Crew Working For A New, Young Owner

When you hear that Kevin James is starring in a new sitcom, you usually think that it’ll be a competent show with a good cast, but will mostly be “accidentally funny.” What do I mean by that? Well, for the most part, you might watch James do his usual angry/bumbling oaf act and not laugh for 80% of an episode, but then his inherent charm and comedic timing will connect with you and you’ll let out a big belly laugh. That’s exactly what happened when we watched the first episode of The Crew. Read on for more.

THE CREW: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: The shot of a race track, and the garages where the cars and crews get ready for a race. Crew chief Kevin Gibson (Kevin James) goes up to the team’s driver, Jake (Freddie Stroma), to see how he’s feeling before the race.

The Gist: Kevin has been with the NASCAR race team owned by Bobby Spencer (Bruce McGill) for 25 years, and he keeps the tight-knit crew going. But the team hasn’t won a lot lately, evidenced by Jake crashing in the first lap of his last race.

But he feels that the team, who includes master mechanic Chuck (Gary Anthony Williams), engineer Amir (Dan Ahdoot) and his best friend, office manager Beth (Sarah Stiles), is the best around. You can see some of the closeness when Kevin and Beth talk about how he goes right to her whenever he gets dumped by yet another woman who doesn’t appreciate how consuming his job is.

Bobby has decided to retire, and he’s putting his twenty-something daughter Catherine (Jillian Mueller) in charge. It soon becomes apparent that Catherine, who used to be a Silicon Valley executive, wants to put her own stamp on the team, especially because their performance has been lagging of late. Kevin, of course, thinks everything is fine, and they are just going through a bit of a lull.

Catherine’s first decision is to talk to a hot-shot 19-year-old female driver named Jesse (Paris Berelc), which Jake finds out about on that driver’s Instastory (Beth describes stories as things “that aren’t good enough to post on your main feed”). In order to protect Jake, Kevin proposes a race off, where the best lap time wins. Jake ends up winning by a hair, but crashes the car when the charms on his bracelet — which he says was made by “Tibetan monkeys” — come off and fly in his face.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The King of Queens or Kevin Can Wait, except with stock cars.

Our Take: Most of the first episode consisted of worn-out sitcom gags wrapped in an almost suffocating amount of product placement (more on this in a bit). James plays pretty much the same guy in every one of his sitcoms and movies: Agreeable but prone to outbursts, oafish but mostly loveable. He’s a tad less oafish as Kevin Gibson, mainly to make sure audiences can buy the fact that he was a winning driver in the ’90s and in charge of a successful NASCAR crew for over two decades. But there are still moments where James ramps up on the old standards, like when he pushes around Jake for not paying attention to his pep talk.

But James, an executive producer along with series creator Jeff Lowell, knows that a team is better when its leader surrounds himself with people that make him look better. And, even during the mostly laugh-free first episode, you can already see how the supporting cast will make the show better. Stroma, Williams and Ahdoot are sitcom veterans that will make the most of the limited screen time their characters get, and Stiles’ Beth is a spitfire of a character who has great chemistry with James (more on her in a bit, as well). Mueller’s character, who is set up to be Kevin’s foil, is the least funny of the supporting cast, but even she has a moment or two where we can see her character being more than just a millennial caricature.

But just because The Crew has potential to be funnier, and get its jokes from the characters’ personalities versus just gags, doesn’t mean that it will be funnier. And, while we saw some flashes of that potential in the first episode, we’re not sure how hard the show will strive to take advantage of those flashes.

Sex and Skin: None. Kevin ends up getting dumped after leaving his date at the bar where he’s going to double-date with Beth and her boyfriend.

Parting Shot: Beth tells Kevin that one day he’ll meet someone who cares about the team as much as he does, which he doubts. She settles in to watch an old race where Kevin was a driver, but when she asks him how long it is, he says, “Two and a half hours,” which is when she decides to leave.

Sleeper Star: From the first minutes she’s on screen, it feels like Lowell and his writers are setting Beth up to be a love interest for Kevin. They’re already best friends, and then when she talks about him meeting someone who cares about the team, she responds to his doubts in a way that makes us think she has a thing for him, despite being in a relationship. Like we said, Stiles and James have great chemistry, but putting a will-they-won’t-they element in this show feels like a mistake.

Most Pilot-y Line: The NASCAR product placement is overwhelming, but to get the organization’s endorsement, it makes sense. We also see an Xfinity sign in the garage. But then Beth and Kevin talk about the Coffee Coolatta at Dunkin’ Donuts, then walk in the garage with Dunkin’ cups, the product placement went from necessary to ridiculous.

Our Call: SKIP IT. The Crew has some potential to become better than the average Kevin James project, but it’s mired in the same pitfalls that made people dislike The King Of Queens (though that show was underrated) and Kevin Can Wait (which was pretty bad). The show’s overwhelming reminders that “THIS IS NASCAR” don’t help.

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, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream The Crew On Netflix