'Happy Endings' Premiere Episodes

Happy Endings is another in a long line of recent sitcoms featuring the romantic lives of young urbanites, and it does nothing to distinguish itself from its already undistinguished peers.

Just in case Traffic Light, Perfect Couples, Mad Love and Better With You didn’t fulfill your need for bland shows about the romantic lives of yuppies, here comes one more show to add to this season’s inexplicable pile of Friends clones: It’s Happy Endings, which seems initially to have a different kind of hook but by the end of its first episode reveals itself as basically no different from those other shows. That first episode has a bit of a nasty streak, starting out at the wedding of Dave (Zachary Knighton) and Alex (Elisha Cuthbert), which Alex calls off after it’s interrupted by her secret admirer. Cut to weeks later, and David is devastated while Alex is alternately apologetic and pissy. They can’t get along with each other, but what about their mutual friends?

What could be a show filled with humorous tension and unease instead diffuses all of its nastiness by the end of the pilot, when Dave and Alex agree to get along and continue to hang out with their same group of friends. After that, the whole runaway-bride angle might as well not even exist.

From there, Happy Endings loses any kind of uniqueness it might have had, and the characters aren’t interesting or funny enough to sustain it beyond that. Casey Wilson has a sort of manic energy as the group’s desperate single woman, and Eliza Coupe, who was pretty good in the later seasons of Scrubs as a grumpy young doctor, can be nicely sarcastic.

But mostly the actors just live up to the characters’ generic nature, and the stock sitcom scenarios don’t give them much to play with. There’s no sense of real emotion or consequences to anything that happens, and thus the little relationship dilemmas fall flat. Even an episode involving the gay Max (Adam Pally) coming out to his parents lacks feeling. The whole show is just a cardboard approximation of something better, and sadly it’s had plenty of company in that regard this season.

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