Network: NBC; Genre: Comedy; Content Rating: TV-PG (for language and adult content); Classification: Contemporary (star range: 1 - 4);
Seasons Reviewed: Season 1 of 2
"Watching Ellie" invites us to spend 22 screwball minutes with Ellie Rigg (Julia Louis Dryfuss), a lounge singer whose life is a perpetual barrage of set-backs and annoyances that include obnoxious ex-boyfriends, creepy supers (Peter Stormare) and overflowing toilets as she races to make deadlines in this frenzied, fast-paced, work-a-day world.
Created by husband Brad Hall ("Saturday Night Live"), "Ellie" is a show only this couple could love. This long anticipated return to TV for powerhouse actress Julia Louis Dryfuss ("Seinfeld") is nothing short of a massive disappointment. Despite the ensemble around her (some of undeniable talent and some of questionable) "Ellie" is a platinum self-indulgent star vehicle for Dryfuss, a showcase from a loving husband and nepotism run wild. It is cringe-inducing to watch Dryfuss running around frantically while "Ellie" tries to create a screwball atmosphere that results in a complete train wreck.
The gimmick "Ellie" rides on is - get this - an ever-present ticking digital clock on the screen to help us count down the minutes until it's over. It screams "gimmick", distracts from the action on screen and undeniably contributes to the comedy dropping dead all over the place. Coming a year after Fox's effectively used clock-ticking terrorist thrill-ride "24" it baffles the mind what in the world Hall thought this would add to a situation comedy. The show is completely unsatisfying, going nowhere and literally cutting off as time runs out before any, at all, pay-off. And this comes from someone who is a big fan of the smash-cut anti-endings of "Seinfeld", "Curb Your Enthusiam" and "The Office".
Don't blame the supposed "Seinfeld Curse". The problem is that Dryfuss, like Michael Richards and Jason Alexander take themselves as actors (read as "ak-TOR" with a nose-in-the-air pretentious drawl) and their craft very seriously. Dryfuss desperately wants to get away from Elaine Bennace and in this attempt she has mistakenly created a character that is actually more repugnant than her "Seinfeld" counterpart. Not even Elaine would have an affair with a married man, something Ellie Rigg is introduced as doing in the first episode. The show then has the sheer gall to ask us to root for her sneaking and shuffling around trying not to get caught by his wife like Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. The time drones on and on.
In another sign the show is failing in its goals: Ellie, the character it wants us to care about, is so selfish and repulsive that we can't stand her to the point where we actually end up caring more for pathetic Edgar (Steve Carrell, in his first big step away from "The Daily Show), the character we are supposed to be repulsed by.
There is loving to hate a deliciously played anti-hero and then there is this, where Dryfuss wants to be bad but still wants us to love her. I know TV viewers are enamored with the single-camera laugh track-less style right now, but a show like "Watching Ellie" is perfectly exemplary of how lazy and devoid of creativity this execution can actually be. There still need to be fresh ideas in the mix instead of the window dressing of ticking clocks giving people the false sense of innovation.
Here is where things get a little different. Instead of just sitting around and complaining like everybody else I'm going to suggest a real solution that may have given this show a fighting chance. Maybe not in the ratings, but this would have given the show some everlasting dignity. Instead of retreating and taking the show back to a multi-camera, studio audience sitcom (as a 2nd season network retool did), Hall should have taken "Ellie" the other direction and this concept all the way to the edge.
Keep the single camera, keep the entire cast and for the sake of ease keep the stories (although "Ellie"s lame writing and plotting is one of its biggest problems). In this age when viewers are savee about media manipulation it would have been gutsier and more innovative to do a real-time series that was actually real time. As in, with no cuts. Challenging Dryfuss and her ensemble to do the entire series in one take and with a camera following her reality-series-style, blocked out, in her apartment and through the streets. It could have been a satire of the deadlines, suffocating technology and manufactured stress of modern life. Although with Brad Hall at the helm it wouldn't have been much funnier, this new voyeuristic element would have been more respectable and more innovative than what we have here. The problem with the show isn't the concept: it, unfortunately, is Brad Hall and Julia Louis-Dryfuss.
* / 4
