'100 Questions' Premiere

100 Questions is a bland, forgettable sitcom in the Friends mode, with a bunch of interchangeable attractive people looking for love. Although its premise, in which main character Charlotte Payne answers a 100-question survey for a dating service, is clever, the execution offers nothing new.

Delayed numerous times (it was initially announced as part of NBC’s upcoming fall schedule in May 2009), 100 Questions limps onto the air with ample evidence of why the network booted it to summer. The show starts with a fairly clever premise: Single New Yorker Charlotte Payne (Sophie Winkleman) has decided to sign up for a dating service in order to meet the man of her dreams, and to do so she has to answer a 100-question personality survey about what she’s looking for in a mate. Each question prompts a recollection of an incident from Charlotte’s romantic past.

In practice, though, the questions merely bookend a generic sitcom about a group of telegenic urban friends looking for love. Charlotte is meant to be so charming that men can’t help but propose to her (as one particularly unlucky beau does in the pilot), but she’s no more attractive or enticing than her two female friends, and all three of them are completely uninteresting as people. The pilot already sets up a bit of an unrequited-love dynamic between Charlotte and her male friend Wayne (David Walton), and there’s a sinking sense that after all 100 questions, she’ll probably just end up with that guy anyway.

The actors are all reasonably charming, although the show’s creator, Christopher Moynihan, is probably the least appealing, as the most obnoxious friend in the group. The plot of the opening episode is nothing special, and could easily be recycled for use on any post-Friends show in the last decade. The overbearing laugh track does little to help sell the feeble jokes, and only makes the show more grating.

The promise is that we’ll learn more about Charlotte and her friends as she answers more questions, but the writers are going to have to go to increasingly silly lengths to get plots out of generalized relationship topics. That probably won’t end up being an issue, though, since 100 Questions is getting its limited episode order dumped with little fanfare into the dead of summer. It’s likely we’ll end up with a show more properly titled Six Questions.

Disclosure: A review screener was provided by the network. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.