TROPHY WIFE

*** (out of ****)

All month long we’ll be discussing Pilotitis, a horrifically contagious diseases that surfaces every year around this time. Symptoms include tired, hack ideas and spoon feeding information down people’s throats. Trophy Wife isn’t a perfect show, but it is able to skip past so much of the terrible stuff most pilots are forced to do that it’s hard not to like it a little bit.

We open on a drunk Malin Akerman, about to pass out in the back seat of her husband’s ex-wife’s car. Then we spend five minutes listening as Akerman narrates how she got in that situation: she became her husband’s third wife, the first two of which are still around, helping raise the kids. It’s like Big Love for the Divorce Generation. So Akerman goes from a single party girl to one of the matriarchs in a seven member family. What Trophy Wife is able to do so effectively is rocket us through this premise so that we can get an actual story in the pilot. It has a lot to do, and it cheats a little bit, but it makes great time, and doesn’t feel like a constant image overload. The stories are hack as FUCK (teenage boy is nervous about asking a girl out, step daughter doesn’t like step mother, two parents try to replace a dead pet with a lookalike), but we get through them all, without feeling tired, or like they think we’re stupid.

Until the adults in the show give their characters a moment to breathe, the comedy is anchored by Akerman and a little Chinese kid. The kid is pretty funny — and no, him being Chinese is not used for any of the punchlines. He’s just typically TV precocious, but with a delivery style that freshens things up a little bit (and please don’t ask if the delivery style is on a bike, or inside those little white containers. Be at least as good as Trophy Wife). And then there’s Akerman, an almost total no-show on Childrens Hospital this season, probably because of this. She’s actually pretty impressive here, and needs to be, because despite the ensemble, the whole thing falls on her shoulders. We have seen variations on her character, Kate, played to the lowest common denominator, and often comes off as a dumb slut — someone that no one would want to be around, least of all an audience. It’s still a little unclear what she saw in this guy that would make her completely change her life like this, but she did it, and if they don’t make you totally buy the relationship, you definitely buy her commitment to making it work, even though she’s a little dumb and a little slutty. Now we just need Michaela Watkins’ New Age hippy and Marcia Gay Harden’s stonefaced doctor to develop a little bit, and Bradley Whitford to get anything to do, and we may be on to something here.

-Ryan Haley