Two very different takes on social awkwardness

I'm often not a huge fan of social awkwardness humor.  Unless done with a very deft hand, it just makes me feel so uncomfortable and empathetic that I'd rather shut it off than endure it.  Sometimes, though, socially awkward characters are so loveable, or so funny, that they're worth the discomfort.  Sometimes they make important statements about the society that pushes them into awkward corners.

So how do this season's social awkwardness comedies fare? 

Super Fun Night (ABC, new.  Single-camera sitcom.)

Watched: First two episodes

Premise:  The self-effacing exploits of a lawyer and her roommates.

Promise: Frankly, I was afraid to watch this show. I have a lot of respect for Rebel Wilson and her self-effacing humor, but I didn’t trust the network to make this show anything other than a bunch of sizeist claptrap (especially after a deeply sizeist promo for the second episode).  Good news: My fears were largely unfounded.  The show is, in actuality, trenchantly funny social commentary about the relationship between sizeism, social normativity, and self-doubt.  So trenchant, in fact, that’s not always easy to watch—but at its heart, the show always has an excellent core to fall back on:  the fact that the three main characters, despite (or because of?) their divergences from social norms, are smart, loveable, attractive, sympathetic people.  Like The Mindy Project, the core of the show is an extraordinary woman, poking fun at her insecurities and the sometimes-very-poor decisions they lead her to make.  Rebel Wilson’s character is more universally likeable than Mindy, but the shows have many similarities.  To the extent there are “fat jokes” in Super Fun Night—and there are some—they are generally made at the expense of the skinny, rather than the expense of the fat:  that is, they demonstrate how nonsensical sizeism is, and point up the main characters’ strengths.  I came away from the pilot feeling really sorry for the insecure “perfect” people, and loving those who defy social expectations and self-doubts to be their fabulous selves.  For the anime watchers out there, this show reminds me a bit of Princess Jellyfish, which is very high praise coming from me. 

Verdict:  So far, so good. The concept is fraught with risks, and in execution, the show doesn’t get it right every time.  I still have some worries about how it will play out in the long run.  But I’ll be watching to see.

Hello Ladies (HBO, new. Single-camera sitcom.)

Watched: Pilot

Premise:  A lonely man is desperate to date women who aren’t interested in him.

Promise:  There are some superficial similarities between this show and Super Fun Night—both are about people who don't quite fit in and engage in occasional insecurity-driven self-sabotage.   But the similarities end there.  Where Super Fun Night is about loveable misfits, Hello Ladies is about a pathetic, insensitive sap.  That Hello Ladies is uncomfortable to watch shouldn’t be surprising—Steven Merchant, who created (and stars in) Hello Ladies, is one of the co-creators of The Office, so he’s gotten a lot of mileage from social awkwardness.  And shows about insensitive leads aren’t automatically unbearable—Curb Your Enthusiasm walked the line, and usually stayed on the effective side of it.  But this show demonstrates (as if we needed a lesson) that inconsiderateness alone does not make a funny show.  To be funny, the characters have to be inconsiderate and funny.  Here, the main character makes no effort to treat his female conquests as anything but objects, and ignores the virtues and concerns of those around him, combining social tone-deafness, selfishness, presumption, and unsupportiveness into a heady mix that—shocker!—leaves him lonely.  Then it asks us to feel sorry for him.  To the extent this show is aiming for “nice guys finish last,” it misses the mark, instead landing squarely in “karma’s a bitch” territory.  The show falls back on the classically insulting trope of “women are capricious and unpredictable”—it’s true of even the only female regular in the cast, and even the off-camera female characters—and the grand irony is that, for the most part, the women’s responses are pretty reasonable, given the abiding personality flaws of the men around them.  Perhaps that irony is supposed to be overt.  Perhaps we’re supposed to see this show as the same trenchant commentary on male desperation as Super Fun Night is on normativity and self-doubt.  But unlike Super Fun Night, there’s no one here to love.  There’s just a central character you can’t root for, and can’t even feel sorry for.  He’s just sad and annoying. 

Verdict:  Goodbye Ladies.

On the DVR: Lucky 7 (canceled) , Masters of Sex, Betrayal, Sean Saves the World, and Witches of East End.  But lest we think that list is getting short, more new ones start tomorrow.