It’s CBS PREMIERE WEEK, a fact you might have been aware of had you watched a moment of any Paramount Global media entity since, oh, July. The most-watched and most traditionally programmed broadcast network has made a VERY big deal about how they were rolling back the clock and clustering their season premieres predominantly over a much-ballyhooed appointment viewing event–the way it did when they had lots of new series and returning hits that all attracted audiences of tens of millions of viewers in real time.
That was back when sitcoms were plentiful and new ones were frequently slotted on the half-hour behind established hits in order to maximize the chance for someone to sample them. We called those shows “Thirty” shows, and more often that not shows that executives knew in their hearts weren’t all that great at least at the pilot stage were destined to languish there for the duration of their runs. Occasionally, a “thirty” show would be genuinely good and eventually move to the top an hour–prominent examples include the likes of EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND, THE BIG BANG THEORY and SEINFELD. Most of them would never get such opportunties–the best would sustain themselves and limp into syndication and often disappoint their buyers who couldn’t provide such a supportive lineup. The rest would be a never-ending sea of forgettable one-season shots that would make us question exactly how and why they even got ordered to series at all.
These days, CBS’ top scripted shows are getting audiences in merely seven figures, and they pretty much need every minute of their live-plus-seven (or even 35) windows to get within shouting distance of what they achieved a season before. As for sitcoms–especially new ones? There’s exactly one. And it’s about as “Thirty” as they come.
DMV was the network’s choice to be the sole new sitcom of a lineup that now includes a mere two hours a week of them. We’ve mused about this before, and let’s just say things have only gotten worse for the genre since. It’s a left pocket/right pocket order from in-house supplier CBS Studios, natch, only production was exiled to Montreal in order to take advantage of Canadian exchange rates and efficiencies.
It’s been planted behind the swan song season of CBS’ longest-running comedy, THE NEIGHBORHOOD, which for the balance of its run was successfully paired with BOB HEARTS ABISHOLA–shows that appealed to two low-hanging fruit viewing cohorts: African-Americans and non-white collars. With the demise of the latter, last season CBS chose to appeal to the former of the two with the tepid multi-generational Wayans tour de force POPPA’S HOUSE. DMV is squarely aimed at the latter, in theory a broader target, and as a workplace comedy is on paper a potential bullseye for it. This point was not lost on DECIDER’s Joel Keller:
It really feels like there is a formula to the workplace comedy these days. You have the awkward but well-meaning center of the show, oddball coworkers like the one who cares too much and the one who doesn’t care at all, and then clients who act like clueless jerks. A new CBS comedy has all of this, but it takes place in one of the worst places on earth: The DMV.
The only thing that distinguishes DMV from other workplace comedies is where it takes place. Yes, there has never been a show that takes place in the state government bureau that everyone hates going to and hope goes to die, but the character types and situations we see in the first episode aren’t all that different than what we’ve seen in other comedies of this type.
That said, it’s clear that this was populated to pop in testing situations with comedy fans. Keller astutely notes that the opening scenes were essentially designed to get those dials calibrated on the high side:
At a DMV in East Hollywood, we see Collette (Harriet Dyer), a driving test examiner, getting in a car with a guy who looks like he may have violence in his history. Vic (Tony Cavalero) another examiner, gets his driver to pay for his breakfast. And a third examiner, Gregg (Tim Meadows) tests a hoarder and gets sprayed by a ferret.
They’re familiar faces to ardent comedy fans; the versatile Dyer has been prominent in both one of the few other new sitcoms ordered in this decade, NBC’s AMERICAN AUTO, and the cult favorite imported from her native Australia COLIN FROM ACCOUNTING that has somehow caught buzz on Paramount Plus. Cavalero is a veteran of another home for passionistas, EASTBOUND AND DOWN, and Meadows, of course, has been known for decades for SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE and, more recently, his omnipresence on both THE GOLDBERGS and its ill-conceived spinoff/companion piece SCHOOLED set a decade later. Rarely has an actor been asked to simultaneously portray a character at two stages of his life. One might also recognize another SNL (and LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN) alum Molly Kearney in a co-starring role as the harangued office manager.
Keller’s qualified “stream it” recommend correlates to how VARIETY’s
Like many pilots, “DMV” gets off to a rocky start. The series opener offers viewers a brief overview of the inner workings of the DMV, but it fails to deliver sufficient grounding for a truly distinct narrative. However, in Episode 2, “Stay in Your Lane” (critics were given four for review), the show slowly begins to reveal what it wants to be. Amid a universally known backdrop and some absurd situations, “DMV” has all of the right components to be a good workplace comedy. Though the sitcom doesn’t quite hit the ball out of the park right away, as the actors begin to settle into their characters and the backstories and world around them are more completely developed, it could become an engaging weekly delight.