Despite the Fox-Disney Merger, ABC is still trying to make its own FX with blackjack and hookers. They've launched two new sitcoms targeted at Milennials which I've been watching: Grown-ish, a spinoff of Blackish, and the original Alone Together.
Now, I think that Blackish is the funniest sitcom on network television and arguably second-funniest currently airing, period, after Archer. And it seemed at first like Grown-ish was an attempt to be another Community. You've got the wacky professor, the nebbishy dean, and the ragged band of misfits. Unfortunately, this show so far hasn't done it for me.
I think there's several reasons for this. The first is that, unlike with Community, the characters on Grown-ish are all fairly similar, being mostly upper-middle-class kids, except for two track scholarship students. The second is that the characters tend to act much more mature than any undergraduates I've met, and I cannot really suspend disbelief. The third is that the first few episodes have largely been a dramedy about Zoe's dating life, and the only dating-focused show I've enjoyed is How I Met Your Mother, which isn't reeeallly a dating-focused show.
My first reaction to watching Alone Together was that this was a show written by Baby Boomers about Millennials which just seemed too cringy. (Turns out that it was created by Millennials and parodying that, but Poe's Law and all that.) However the ending of the first episode made me laugh, and by the second episode I decided that this is cringe comedy about two awful people.
I like such shows in principle, but I can think of as many such shows that I haven't particularly liked (You're the Worst, Broad City, Workaholics, Idiotsitter) as those that I've loved (It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Bojack Horseman, The Mick). It's too soon to tell which category this will fall into, but while I only moderately enjoyed the first two episodes I liked both better than any of the four episodes of Grown-ish. I also appreciated the joke about watching TV shows on shady Eastern European websites, because that's ... totally not ... *shiftyeyes* how I was watching Alone Together.
Has anyone else been watching these shows?