THE CRAZY ONES

** (out of ****)

Robin Williams is an easy punching bag. Once the king of the comedy world, a title that never lasts very long, Williams shtick seemed to run its course for everyone on the planet, at the exact same time. Thanks to ballooning alimony bills, my favorite reason for any creative decision, Robin Williams was forced to go for the mainstream payday with The Crazy Ones, as opposed to all of the artful, low-paycheck choices he has made recently, like The Big Wedding and Old Dogs. In the pilot, Williams plays Simon Roberts, an advertising big wig with a manic comic personality. He was once a much-loved giant of the industry, but, for many reasons, people have grown tired of his desperate schtick, in large part due to how much he owes his many ex-wives. Sound familiar? Well here’s the problem with TV, specifically network TV. They see Robin Williams as a huge get, despite the fact that he hasn’t had a steady film career in over a decade. He’s such a get, in fact, that it has to be a vehicle for him in every single way; we’re going to damn the whole show as long as it fits Robin. The problem is, if we wanted that same old Robin Williams, we would have gone and seen his movies. With The Crazy Ones, Williams had a chance to re-introduce himself, if not recreate himself entirely. Television is filled with celebrities we thought we knew, who used their new TV shows not as a waving of the movie star flag, but as a way to show us that they’re capable of much more than the one or two things we know them for. If Robin Williams is just going to give us the same old stuff, then it doesn’t matter that it’s in a new format. We’re going to continue not to watch it.

Thanks to him being old and lame, McDonald’s decides that it’s going to end its relationship with Williams’ ad agency. He makes a last ditch pitch, telling them that they need to go back to basics, and find a perfect voice to sing a song in the ad. He lands a meeting with Kelly Clarkson (who desperately wants us to think she’s a cunt, for some reason), and makes his pitch, but she wants to sing about sex. That’s her thing. She’ll be their shill, but she needs to sing about sex. This is already far past how stupid I will let a show get, but it keeps going. Williams and his protege, James Wolk, decide to improvise a song that mixes sex and fast food. Despite how much you will laugh at it, the show is in love with it. It lets the two actors go for an insane amount of time, singing dirty things about ketchup and buns. Then it gives them two more opportunities to do the same bit throughout the course of the episode. THEN, if that wasn’t enough, we get an outtake over the end credits, featuring Kelly Clarkson losing her shit as Robin Williams vaguely mentions fast food items in a vaguely sexual manner. She can’t stop laughing. Oh, I get it. You had to be there. That’s a weird thing to put into a show, where there were only 100 people that were there, but millions of people will have to watch it.

I don’t want to continue to shit on Robin Williams. Everybody has at least the slightest soft spot for him, thanks to the fact that you’re a fan of Aladdin or Garp or Good Will Hunting (I’ve always been partial to Jakob the Liar. Hilarious!) I guess it seems like a pipe dream to hope for a reinvention of something from a show like this on a network like CBS. There’s too much money involved to try something risky, and they know that’s not what we want anyway.

-Ryan Haley