Believe it or not, I try not to pass judgment on TV shows before they hit the air but sometimes there are some that just scream shit based on the treatment they receive at their network home. The Paul Reiser Show is no exception. It's been in development for well over a year and NBC has so little faith in it that they produced a mere six episodes, held the series back for months and have now given it an April 14 debut at 7:30 PM.
Alonge the vein of Larry David's HBO comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm which the Paul Reiser Show is supposedly modeled after, Larry David has a history of being truly funny. He was the creative voice behind Seinfeld and his quirkiness shows excellently on his HBO show. Paul Reiser, on the other hand, made us all suffer through 6 or 8 seasons of Mad About You and hasn't done anything of note since that time. There's a reason he's been lying dormant for the past decade and a half. He's just not funny anymore and probably wasn't that funny during Mad About You's NBC run in the late 80s and early 90s.
During that time, cable TV didn't do much, if anything, in the way of original scripted content so the networks ruled. But after cable networks stepped up their game, the weaknesses of the networks become painfully apparent. They can't capture a mass audience anymore but still cling to that seemingly ancient identity that they are the gold standard for news and entertainment because they used to be that and by their thinking, things never change. Well, they do and in this new world, Paul Reiser has been exposed as being terribly unfunny.
Will I watch The Paul Reiser Show though? Probably. But will it be funny and capture the minds of more than the 2% of Americans who still watch NBC? Probably not.
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