A Show That Has To Go: 'Mom'

Mom/Mondays at 9:30 EST on CBS

Look, I get what Anna Faris is doing here – or, at the very least, trying to do: Pull a Zooey Deschanel. Catch is, Anna Faris is no Zooey Deschanel. The closest Faris came to a 500 days of Summer was The House Bunny. But, Faris wants her very own New Girl, and Mom, at least on the surface, probably proved irresistible. After all, it was created (in part anyway) by Chuck Lorre, who has given the network many a hit, Two & a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory among them.

Plus, there’s Allison Janney. Janney always delivers, on the big screen (Juno, for one) and small (The West Wing); it’s just, there ain’t anything to deliver here. Playing the recovering alcoholic mother to Faris’s recovering alcoholic titular mom, you’d think both ladies would knock this stuff out of the park. Recovering alcoholic is so in both of their wheelhouses. The problem is, there is zero material to knock out of the park. Zilch. Nada.

Even the setting for the sitcom – California’s famed Sonoma County wine country – elicits a groan. Talk about a badump-dump, see it coming from a mile away plot device. Why not just have Faris slinging six-packs at a liquor store?

Beyond that, the secondary characters are one train wreck after another, wherein a beacon of incredulous light might’ve provided some much needed laughs. As Christy, Faris is as wide-eyed as ever, only slightly sharper than her recurring character on Friends, which isn’t saying much. But she’s done this bit to death.

Hey, there is time. The only one who doesn’t give Lorre a second chance is Charlie Sheen.

Vinnie Penn (@VinniePenn) first hit the airwaves as co-host to Glenn Beck. By 2001 he was a regular on Howard Stern, and his work has appeared in national magazines such as Maxim, Hit Parader, and Cracked. He currently writes for MSN. Visit his websiteVinniePenn.net.

A Show That Has To Go: ‘Mom’