'Romantically Challenged'

Romantically Challenged is a tired mix of clichés from a thousand past sitcoms, a sad retread of Friends and all its various imitators, with flat characters, lifeless writing and forgettable performances.

Romantically Challenged has been retooled and kicked around ABC’s schedule for over a year now, with its first-season order reduced from 13 episodes to just six. It’s essentially canceled before even premiering, and watching the limp, pathetic show that resulted from all that tampering just makes me wish the network had killed it altogether. Alyssa Milano is a likable actress who starred in one classic sitcom (Who’s the Boss?) and proved her continued appeal in a long-term guest stint on My Name Is Earl, and she deserves better than this crappy Friends rip-off.

At one time this show was about a guy caught between his new girlfriend and his underachieving best friend, which is a boring idea but is at least an actual premise. The show that made it on the air is just about a group of urban friends looking for love, the main twist being that they are in Pittsburgh rather than some more common TV city like New York, although really they live in sitcom-land. Milano’s Rebecca Thomas has just gotten divorced after a 15-year marriage, but her flailing about on the dating scene doesn’t really differ from that of any given single sitcom character, and her teen son barely registers in the episode available for review (which is actually the fourth one produced).

Rebecca’s friends are equally generic and uninteresting, although Kelly Stables as Rebecca’s party-girl sister Lisa does have an effectively tart delivery of her sarcastic lines that give them more bite than they really have. The jokes are so flat that even the greatest comedic performers would barely be able to sell them, and these actors are definitely not the greatest comedic performers. Veteran sitcom director James Burrows has guided numerous classics to icon status, including Cheers, Taxi, Frasier and Friends itself, but his traditional style now seems more anachronistic than timeless. Romantically Challenged plays like a forgotten sitcom from 1992, and the quicker that ABC wants to just forget it ever green-lit this show, the better.

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