'Mad Love' Premiere

Mad Love is a mediocre relationship comedy about young people in New York City, elevated slightly by its charming cast.

Among the recent spate of sitcoms about young couples, Mad Love stands out merely by not being entirely awful, helped along by a cast of generally charming and funny performers. It certainly doesn’t reinvent the format, but like its CBS Monday lineup companion How I Met Your Mother, it brings a sense of fun and camaraderie to a familiar premise. In this case it’s the ever-popular look at the love lives of urbanites in their late 20s, just at that period between freedom and settling down. Mad Love focuses on two pairs of best friends: Ben (Jason Biggs) is the hopeless romantic (much like Ted on How I Met Your Mother), while Larry (Tyler Labine) is the immature slacker (although somehow both are successful lawyers). Kate (Sarah Chalke) is Ben’s female counterpart, another wide-eyed romantic who falls hard for him as soon as they meet (and he does the same). Her best friend Connie (Judy Greer) is sardonic and cynical, and of course she and Larry immediately hate each other (look for their romance in the second or third season, if the show lasts that long).

The pilot of Mad Love plays almost like a romantic-comedy feature film in miniature, which makes me wonder how the premise will be sustained over the long term. Ben and Kate meet cute and fall for each other right away, but there are obstacles in the way, including the demanding girlfriend he’s trying to break up with, as well as several silly misunderstandings. By the end of the episode, they’ve cleared away the impediments to their relationship, and while there will undoubtedly be more that arise as time goes on, the last moments of the pilot feel like an ending, not a beginning. Whether Mad Love can sustain the agreeable romantic tone of its first episode over time is, at the moment, a mystery.

If it can, it will most likely be thanks to the actors, several of whom replaced different stars originally cast in the show. Biggs is sort of bland, but Chalke has a nice spunky energy (the same quality she brought to Scrubs), and Labine and Greer (both veterans of several short-lived TV shows) are quite amusing as the sidekicks who are more interesting than the heroes. Greer especially has had a tough time finding a good outlet for her tart comic style, and this could finally be the right place for her. That is, of course, if the show manages to last long enough to give her a decent spotlight.

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