Valerie Armstrong’s series has one sharp idea, a sitcom wife who steps out of the sitcom, and two performers good enough to carry it. Over sixteen episodes the idea thins, the crime plot wobbles and Kevin stays on the sofa too long.
Valerie Armstrong’s series opens as a sitcom about a big, loud husband and the wife who rolls her eyes at him, the kind of marriage American television spent twenty years asking us to find adorable. Kevin McRoberts throws himself a party and the audience laughs at everything he says. Then Allison walks out of the living room and the series goes with her. The light drops, the laughter stops, the camera comes off its stand and follows her into a kitchen with stains on the counter, and she is a woman thinking about killing her husband. It is a sharp idea, and the first time it happened we sat up. Over two runs of eight episodes it is also an idea the series has to keep paying for.
The two halves are properly built. Shannon Madden and Adrian Correia light the sitcom flat and bright from three fixed positions, the sofa dead centre and the front door ready for whoever is about to burst through it; the drama scenes are handheld, close and the colour of a winter afternoon, browns and greys and car-park orange. Tony Fanning and James Bolenbaugh dress the living room so it reads as a set, then let that same space look tatty and small when Allison is alone in it. Carol Cutshall puts her in florals and cardigans that are cheerful under studio lights and look like somebody else’s clothes in daylight. The editors, Ivan Victor, Dan Schalk, Maura Corey and Kenneth LaMere, make the switch a hard cut, usually on a door, and never soften it.
Annie Murphy, who spent six series being Alexis Rose in Schitt’s Creek, gives something close to two performances at once. Sitcom Allison is bright and brittle, every line pitched for the back row; drama Allison has the smile wiped off and a voice half an octave lower, and Murphy moves between them in the width of a doorframe. She is at her best in silence, in a car or a diner booth, letting the plan form on her face. The series depends on her and she holds it.
Mary Hollis Inboden’s Patty is the reason to stay. She is the neighbour and the sidekick’s sister, a woman who has watched Kevin for years with the patience of someone who stopped expecting better from anyone, and once the series starts letting her out of the sitcom too it finds its real subject: two women who do not much like each other working out how to be on the same side. Eric Petersen plays Kevin with total commitment to a part the series holds in contempt, which is a harder job than it looks, and Alex Bonifer gives Neil a stupidity with something frightened under it. Raymond Lee, as Sam, the man Allison might have married, is quietly decent and slightly dull, which is about right.
The trouble is the living room. The sitcom scenes are bad on purpose, and a bad joke made on purpose is still a bad joke, and there are a great many of them. By the fifth episode we found ourselves dreading the cut back to the sofa, and we are not convinced the series meant us to dread it quite that much; the point had been made by the end of the first hour. The murder plot is the weaker thread as well. Allison is not good at crime, which is fair, but the series cannot decide whether her bungling is comedy or tragedy, and the arrival of Candice Coke’s Detective Tammy Ridgeway and Robin Lord Taylor’s Nick pulls it toward a crime show it never fully commits to.
The second run is better. It stops pretending the plot is the engine and lets Allison and Patty carry it, and the final episodes give Petersen something to play beyond the braying, which we will not describe. We laughed in the first run and felt grubby about it, which is what the series wanted; by the end of the second we had stopped laughing at Kevin altogether, and that felt earned rather than imposed.
Watch it in stretches of two or three episodes, for Murphy and Inboden, and accept the living room as the price of the kitchen. It runs to sixteen episodes of around 44 minutes and carries a 15 certificate.
