Executive Producers: James Burrows, Steve Levitan, Christopher Lloyd
Airs: 8pm, Tuesday on Fox
There aren’t many people who won’t be able to relate to Gary, the would-be anchorman stuck in an inferior reporter position, and his exasperation at the non-stop promos celebrating anchorman Chuck Darling’s return to local television because they’ve all been bombarded with Fox’s desperate promos for Back to You whose producers think they’ve given re-birth to the sitcom. Kelsey Grammer’s pompous, hyper-masculine Chuck had an on-air screw-up that, unfortunately, gained him YouTube infamy and sent him back to his small-scale local job in Pittsburgh. Darling’s down-spiraling journey from the big leagues back to the little ones serves as an appropriate figure for the death of the sitcom, and his overly confident attitude serves as an even better one for Back to You’s failure to facilitate the sitcom renaissance it thinks it’s brought about.
Patricia Heaton’s Kelly, with her Debora Barone-like feistiness, sets off sufficient sparks with co-anchor Darling, but the sparks lack afterglow. Kelly, who stayed with the lowly Pittsburgh job for the ten years Chuck spent in big cities, and Chuck share a back-story that will likely garner enough comic tension to sustain the series, but their big and empty personalities will put the already tired jokes in an irreversible coma. The supporting players, including a rarely funny sex-crazed weatherwoman (she likes to be called meteorologist, even though she isn’t one) and a downright annoying high-strung news director, have even less human characteristics, with still lesser abilities at making witty banter.
Laugh tracks aren’t so bad if they’re drowned out by your own laughter. With Back to You, though, you’ll always know the laugh tracks are there, like constant reminders from the producers that, yes, this is it, the return of the sitcom in all its pre-millennium glory. Then you’ll realize that not one scene from the pilot is YouTube-worthy.
