What's it about?
When Reba's husband, a country music star, cheats on her, Reba moves her fmaily from Nashville to Malibu. Her mama, Lillie Mae, comes along for their California adventure that starts quickly when they move in next door to Kim, a rich, buxom, blonde housewife. Having given up her own singing career to raise her two kids, Reba's bent on starting where she left off.
(from ABC.com)
You should watch if...
• ...a show about a country singer living in Malibu sounds like a hysterical fish-out-of-water comedy to you.
• ...you have a hankering for Lily Tomlin on your TV, in however degrading the role.
• ...you feel like the one thing NASHVILLE is missing is a laugh track.
So, how was it?
MALIBU COUNTRY arrived on ABC this past Friday with very little fanfare. It's funny that this show is airing on the same network as NASHVILLE, as both shows center around a middle-aged female country music star who is trying to make a comeback. Fortunately for NASHVILLE, and unfortunately for MALIBU COUNTRY, the similarities end there.
The main difference is, obviously, that MALIBU COUNTRY is a multi-cam, live-audience sitcom. Anyone familiar with my taste in television can tell you that I am generally not a fan of that genre. However, duty required that I sit through the first episode, so sit through it I did. And it's actually not as horrible as a lot of other multi-cam comedies, and way better than the dreck it's paired with on Friday nights (Tim Allen's horrifically offensive LAST MAN STANDING). There's a reason that Reba McEntire already has a successful sitcom under her belt -- she's engaging, relatable, and knows how to land a punchline. (Whether or not you find that punchline funny is an entirely different matter.)
How Reba roped Lily Tomlin in to co-star in this is a mystery to me. Ms. Tomlin plays Reba's grey-haired mother who starts self-medicating with marijuana lollipops within approximately five minutes of arriving in California. Because Lily Tomlin is Lily Tomlin, her scenes are funny, but I have a hard time believing that the pot-addled grandmother won't become tiresome after another, oh, one episode. If this were a one-time thing, I wouldn't mind that Ms. Tomlin donated her superb craft to this unremarkable role, but the fact that it might keep her talent tied up for months (or, god forbid, years) is a tragedy.
While MALIBU COUNTRY purports to be about a woman who wakes up to find that she is middle-aged and unsuccessful, it's really just a thinly-veiled fish-out-of-water comedy. Most of the scenes in the pilot are used to highlight the difference between the laid-back, wholesome people of Nashville and the plastic-surgery-loving, overly-dramatic, shallow people of Malibu. Somehow I think the bulk of this show's audience will hail from the former location and not the latter. Just a hunch.
And the verdict is...
Meh. Not the worst but not for me.
While I can't say I laughed out loud at any point or even particularly enjoyed myself while watching MALIBU COUNTRY, I can say that I never groaned out loud and facepalmed like I did multiple times while watching other ABC multi-cam sitcoms like LAST MAN STANDING and WORK IT! So Reba does have that going for her. I suspect that being paired with the similarly low-brow LAST MAN STANDING on Friday nights with no competition to speak of will result in the show becoming a middling success. I will be surprised if it doesn't get a full season pick-up, but I will be surprised if I ever tune back in again.
What did you think, Fellow Addicts? Did you find yourself enjoying MALIBU COUNTRY? Or did it make you wish for a pot-lollipop to dull the pain? Vote in the poll below and then hit the comments!
