If you’ve seen the onslaught of trailers for THE MICK, then you’ve basically seen the pilot episode and can cancel your DVR settings. There’s a brief opening in which the title character, Mickey stumbles around a grocery store being disgusting, but it’s so nonsensical and out of place that it wasn’t really shocking or breaking new. Unless you didn’t know that you can snort whipped cream or that women use baby powder to freshen up “down there.” It seems that the disjointed scene is the backstory for Mickey’s character.
From there, she’s in a car with some guy hitching a ride to a fancy party that her sister is throwing. It turns out that she’s just using the guy’s access to wheels because he’s not actually invited to the party. And apparently, her sister is a former stripper now married to a rich guy that didn’t actually expect her sister to show up because they haven’t been in contact in years, which is why Mickey didn’t even recognize her own niece. The FBI shows up to arrest sister and husband and somehow Mickey is roped into baby-sitting while things get straightened out. Baby-sitting entails taking care of her bored, troubled chain smoking owl-loving niece, her litigious and dorky nephew and another younger nephew that is so cute and adorable Mickey keeps him out of school to steal ice cream and hang out with and gets advice about pooping as a hangover cure. Because kids talking about pooping is really creative on the part of the writers.
There is a montage that shows Mickey taking advantage of how the other half lives, playing tennis, swimming in the pool and ultimately drinking red wine in what is presumably her sister’s wedding dress while sliding down the banister. Of course, her cohort in all the nonsense is the maid, who actually cares for the kids and takes care of the household, played stereotypically and delivering the only funny moment of the show when she bashes a security guard over the head and then promises to clean things up.
As Mickey doles out advice to the kids, she drugs her classically lethargic teenage niece, tells her middle nephew to pants a kid at school that turns out to have a giant penis—resulting in lots of penis jokes.
It seems that the show is meant to be a crass commentary on class, but it falls severely short. Basically, the main problem with the show thus far is that it is highly derivative of all the class-conscious, deliberately shocking sitcoms that have come before. Without a believeable plot or unique angle, the humor becomes obvious and thus boring.Mainly because nothing is funny. And nothing is particularly crass or shocking either. Fox already did that 30 years ago with Married with Children. And did it better too, because the jokes were funny and the class commentary came through. Although we know that Mickey hails from Rhode Island and the rich sister is in Greenwich, which is apparently in Connecticut, as a west coaster I have no idea of the significance or class ranking of the east coast cities.
There’s a series of gags surrounding Mickey fighting her niece over the release of an owl, resulting in a dinner table with a War of the Roses-like scene in which Mickey announces that the bird they are enjoying isn’t chicken. It’s just silly and anything but clever. Most scenes are like that. They are vaguely reminiscent of other shows that have mean humor but The Mick goes for the easy ways out rather than creating new material.
The episode closes with the arrested sister calling from another country after fleeing from the FBI’s custody and requesting that Mickey watch the kids for a little longer. It’s going to be pretty tedious to watch Mickey go through a new series of crass growing pains each week as the audience continues to care less and less about her backstory and the future of the bratty rich kids in her care. But clichés about rich people toys never seem to get old for some people, so there’s that to look forward to.
Season 1, Episode 1 (S01E01)
The Mick airs Tuesdays at 830PM on Fox
Read all of our reviews of The Mick here.
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Carly is a freelance writer that watches too much TV while she writes blogs and articles about lifestyle including travel, food, fashion, beauty, home decor, entertainment, health, fitness and wellness and green living.
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Carly Zinderman | Contributor
