High-strung ‘Mick’ manages to offend everyone
With few laughs, there’s not much to redeem this show
If you’re going for outrage, at least try to linger on amusing somewhere along the way. It seems clear The Mick (Sunday, 8 ET/ 5 PT, then Tuesdays, 8:30 ET/PT, egEE out of four), a Fox comedy starring It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Kaitlin Olson and created by two of that FX series’ producers, is trying to be an equal-opportunity offender. You have Olson’s Mickey, a poor, hard-drinking, lawbreaking “degenerate” and her equally low-life boyfriend for those who want to sneer at the lower classes. You have her richsnot sister Poodle and Poodle’s clench-jawed crowd for those who want to sneer at the upper classes.
Oh, and just for added fun, you have Hispanic maid Alba (Carla Jimenez), whom Mickey alter- nately abuses and befriends, serving as both dupe and dope — and who, for good measure, gets squeezed into a pair of too-tight pants, just so the show can work in a weight joke.
Add it all up, and what you actually have is a bad case of sibling envy as Fox stretches for the kind of edgy comedy that has drawn praise and attention (if not always ratings) to sister network FX. What you don’t have is anything fresh or funny, or any reason to watch. The premise here is as old as
Auntie Mame and as recently reused as recently as ABC’s quickly canceled Uncle Buck. After introducing her as she strolls through a convenience store eating food and putting powder down her crotch ( just to establish her badgirl bona fides), Mickey shows up at her rich sister’s Connecticut mansion to beg for money. What she gets instead is temporary custody of her sister’s kids after Mom and Dad get dragged off by the FBI for fraud.
So even though Mickey has, until now, shown little interest in the needs or desires of other human beings, she decides to parent her three new charges. (They’re all spoiled and damaged, because on TV, rich kids almost invariably are.) They’re Sabrina (Sofia Black-D’Elia), who will go to Yale if she can work it into her busy schedule of insulting Mickey and humping her hot boyfriend; Chip (Thomas Barbusca), whose beating by a bully is played for laughs; and Ben (Jack Stanton), a 7-yearold with an eating disorder who gets temporarily hooked on Mickey’s birth control pills.
If that sounds hideous, well, so is everything else about this series, including the writers’ random efforts to make Mickey less hideous as she predictably softens and bonds. Or sometimes:
The Mick can’t be bothered with character consistency, so relationships change on a whim from scene to scene.
Through it all, Olson mugs aggressively, flailing her arms and bugging out her eyes and doing her best to inject some energy into a dead concept. Now and then she manages to squeeze a tiny bit of humor out of a line or bit (as does Jimenez, working against even greater odds), but it doesn’t happen frequently enough to matter. Which makes The Mick yet another huge waste of time and money that might have been far better spent elsewhere.
You want to get outraged, get outraged over that.