'10 Items or Less' rings up too much improv
Improvisational comedy is great in a club, where the actors feed off the audience and come up with jokes on the spot.
The thing is, it's not so great in more of a sitcom format, because it seems canned. It has all the drawbacks of improv comedy, in that it's by nature hit and miss, but none of the spontaneous energy to make up for the inevitable dragging segments.
That's the main problem with "10 Items or Less," John Lehr's largely improvised late-night comedy, which returns for its second season at 10 p.m. today on TBS. Lehr plays Leslie Pool, who has inherited the Greens & Grains grocery in small-town Ohio.
The other problem, however, is that Lehr and his cast of co-workers just aren't very funny and, as one would well imagine, for an improvised show that's debilitating.
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Lehr and co-creators Robert Hickey and Nancy Hower, who also serves as director, basically come up with the framework of the story, but then they tend to let the actors actually improvise their lines. Tonight's season premiere, however, reveals nothing so much as a dearth of inspiration on that note.
Leslie finds $5,000 in silver dollars in his father's safe and decides to put on a "Dollar Day" promotion locking customers in an air booth to grab all the cash they can -- only to find out that even in a swirling vortex of wind it's pretty easy to snatch up silver dollars because they don't blow around like dollar bills.
Hoo ha, that's a knee slapper. Yet things only get worse when Leslie replaces the coins with bills, which attracts a pair of thieves. When one gets locked in the wind booth, a hostage situation develops.
Long story short, Kristen Gronfield's Ingrid proves unusually susceptible to Stockholm Syndrome and sides with the thieves, and Leslie strips off his shirt in an attempt to play hero, only to get shot in the rear end.
"So many holes are in my butt," he says, "I could lace it up like a tennis shoe if I wanted to."
And, with Leslie going on to pun about turning "the other cheek," and referring to one of the masked robbers as "Pantyhose Man," that's pretty much the extent of the even mildly amusing lines in the show.
As a comedy, "10 Items" is capable of better, and an upcoming episode called "Amy Strikes Back" proves it. Jennifer Elise Cox's ultra-competitive Amy gets fired from her job at the rival SuperValueMart for getting caught having sex on a security camera, only to be hired by Leslie, who of course has been nursing a crush on her since childhood.
"I'm a woman with sexual needs," she says. "Forgive me."
"We're all women with sexual needs," agrees the eager-to-please Leslie.
"She's a human being just like you," he explains to the other distrustful employees.
"She's not," deadpans Ingrid. (Now that's an ad-lib so matter-of-fact it's funny.)
As ever, Leslie draws on pop-culture philosophizing to smooth things over, saying, "Remember, even Darth Vader was nice in the end."
Yet, with Amy encouraging him to open the store 24 hours and cut back health benefits, telling him, "Feelings are for wussies," she begins to make Darth Vader look human.
Much of improv humor is about placing characters in the proper framework so that they can simply react in ways that are naturally funny. It's the secret to much of Larry David's "Curb Your Enthusiasm": Simply put him in an uncomfortable situation where Cheryl Hines or Jeff Garlin can react with incredulous disbelief. Lehr's "10 Items or Less," however, isn't in the same league, not in cast nor in concept, although it's a lot closer with Amy in the Greens Grains store than it was before. Here's hoping they have the good sense to find a way to keep her there -- and come up with some funny lines, scripted or not, along the way.
In the air
Remotely interesting: Fox's "American Idol" opens its seventh season with a pair of two-hour episodes at 7 p.m. today and Wednesday on WFLD Channel 32.
WBBM Channel 2 co-sponsors a pair of debates between opponents seeking to replace Dennis Hastert in the 14th Congressional District. The Republicans debate at 7 p.m. today, the Democrats at 7 p.m. Jan. 24, both at Aurora University's Crimi Auditorium. The debates will stream live on the cbs2chicago.com Web site.
End of the dial: CBS at long last has reached a tentative agreement with news writers at its radio and TV stations, including all-news WBBM 780-AM and Channel 2.
Adult-urban WVAZ 102.7-FM has picked up Doug Banks' new syndicated ABC Radio afternoon show from 2 to 6.