And trust me when I say, never thought Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalke could be TOO soapy.
SUMMARY (Spoiler-Free)
Tully Hart (Katherine Heigl/Ali Skovbye) and Kate Mularkey (Sarah Chalke/Roan Curtis) met when they were teenagers and have been best friends ever since, nearly three decades. Now, in 2003, Tully is hosting her own hit show and Kate is getting divorced from her husband Johnny (Ben Lawson) while trying to keep her relationship with her daughter, Marah (Yael Yurman). The show simultaneously plays through their teenage years, their twenties when they were trying to get started in the television industry, and the present.
END SUMMARY
I am a big fan of Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalke and I was hoping that this would be a fun show highlighting both of their comic talents or, at least, their dramatic abilities. Unfortunately, this show did not do that. Not that Heigl and Chalke aren’t great in this show, they are, but the material frequently fights against itself. It constantly tries the most gimmicky and soap-opera-esque plots and the writing forces everyone to overact just to accommodate the lines.
I will say that I think that the girls who play the young versions of the characters do a great job. Ali Skovbye and Roan Curtis both look like they could be the younger versions of the present day and also do rudimentary versions of their future mannerisms that are just different enough to make you think that they will, one day, become Tully and Kate.
A big part of what doesn’t work is that the show’s structure tries to make many of the themes play out simultaneously in the present and both of the past storylines, but the fact that we know how the storylines play out often ruins the impact of the past ones. For example, you kinda know how Kate’s relationship with Johnny will play out, since they’re getting a divorce in the present. Also, in order to keep the past plots secret, people in the “present” of 2003 will seemingly intentionally avoid saying anything about it, which becomes really annoying the fourth or fifth time you notice it. It probably would have been better if they just had two plotlines running. Maybe just do the 70s and the 80s plotlines and save the 2003 for later.
Overall, just wasn’t a huge fan of this show.
If you want to check out some more by the Joker on the Sofa, check out the 100 Greatest TV Episodes of All Time, Collection of TV Episodes, Collection of Movie Reviews, or the Joker on the Sofa Reviews.
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