Best New Show of the Season.
I didn't even know about this show until Hulu started automatically playing it after watching something else. I never would have seen this wonderfully funny show.
How to describe it? It's like a single-camera How I Met Your Mother or (500) Days of Summer the series.
The show is about Andy (Ben Feldman) and Zelda (Christin Milioti (the mother from HIMYM)) who meet and have a relationship (hence A to Z). He is a hopeless romantic who works at a cynical online dating site. Basically he is the new Ted Mosby. Zelda is a lawyer who has given up on relationships. The two meet and have an instant chemistry. On a side note, I love the fact the show does not start off with them sleeping together, but builds as they slowly get to know each other.
There are a few things that bring this show above its cookie-cutter premise.
1. Terminal Show. The context of the show is stated in the opening credits: Andrew and Zelda date for eight months, three weeks, five days, and one hour. This television program is the comprehensive account of their relationship. So this means that the relationship ends at some point (to begin again later?) or it evolves into something else. Regardless, there is a terminal point to the story.
2. Spectacular Writing. The jokes fly fast and furious, they way I like them. And there is a weird, quirky personality to it.
3. The Geek Factor. Like HIMYM, there are so many story points that seem to speak directly to my life as an adult geek. The pilot makes a big reference to the Back to the Future II television special where Robert Zemeckis said hover boards were real. The main character believed it as a child. I stopped the episode and turned to my wife and said that the exact same thing happened to me. Then there was a reference to a couple dressing up like Nightwing and Starfire for comic con, but if that wasn't enough, it was clarified as costumes from the Marv Wolfman run on The New Teen Titans. I was in Geek heaven.
4. The Cast. While Feldman is okay as the lead, Milioti is fantastic as Zelda. She was one of my favorite things about the last season of HIMYM and the chemistry she has with Feldman is good. But for me, the breakout star is Henry Zebrowski as Stu. He is like a combination of Jim Gaffigan and Zach Galifinakas. He has the best lines of the show and delivers them with absolute abandon and has had me belly laughing more than any show this season.
The show is doing awful in the ratings so it does not look like it will likely be around much longer. So check it out while you can.
4 and 1/2 out of 5 stars.
MUST SEE
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