TV Review: Joy Ride?

Free Ride. Sundays on Fox.

Home of Arrested Development at one point. Also home of the hideously lame The War At Home.

Which is Free Ride?

Here's the premise Nate has graduated college and returns home. It's another one of those "Oh my God, the boomerang generation is so damn funny! They move back with their folks! It's funny!" Not so far. Not in past attempts to capture this trend.

It works this time. It's actually funny. Josh Dean deserves a great deal of the credit for that because he's not fallen in love with himself. (Self-love killed Scrubs.) Dean plays Nate. Nate seems to always be on the edge of exploding but never exploding -- instead talking himself down, counting backwards from ten. You get that from the way Dean carries himself and uses his body, not just from facial expressions. More importantly, not just from dialogue.

Dean's not Ed Harris, so what else is making the show work? Well, for one thing, the parents aren't the focus as they steal away to the kitchen to talk about the returning adult child. (Who really thought that would ever find an audience? Someone apparently or it wouldn't have kept getting on air.)

This isn't a family show anymore than That 70s Show is a family show. (We're using "family show" to mean about a family.) What is it? An alternative to The Graduate, if you think about it. Nate's a college graduate (like Benjamin). There's a woman he's in love with who is engaged to someone else -- Erin Cahill plays Nate's Elaine (Amber Danwood). He's not found his way in life yet. We'll assume he doesn't want to sell plastics.

But here's the alternative, unlike in the sixties, times aren't great. The Bully Boy economy is not a booming economy (unless you're in the business of figuring out how to make weapons that kill better or bilk the government via overcharging). That's something that previous attempts at this premise missed. Maybe it was intentional, they didn't care, or maybe it was because real life rarely intrudes in TV living room set.

Free Ride exists away from the world of TV sets. The surroundings are as much a part of the show as the characters. The hospital was a prominent chracter last week. Filled with people just wanting to get to the end of their shift (such as the woman who had no time for Nate or his father who waited in the hall, after his father's operation, for over an hour before finally being given a room). The hospital, like the town, was characterized by the infrequent bursts of activity (always with the promise of something greater that never emerges) that broke up the otherwise dull routine.

That's the mythical Johnson City. Where everyone is just trying to get through the day and convince themselves that things aren't that bad. (That's actually Bully Boy's America as well.)
That's why the father can suggest that just graduated college Nate get a job, first episode, at the local equivalent of Wal-Mart. Nate rejects that idea. But in a later episode he takes a job as a food server at a local Australian-themed eatery. Just get through the day.

Both Nate and the people coming to this bit of (bad) fantasy, just get through the day.

If this played out in slow-mo, if Dean was trying to ape Ray Romano by milking every line with long pauses, the show would be dead in the first few minutes. But Dean's Nate has been outside of Johnson City and hasn't yet gotten back into the nothing-ever-happens mode. That's why he's not pleased with the various excursions Dove takes him on. Dave Sheridan plays Dove, a young man who left high school physically if not mentally.

Dove's used to the town and the nature of it. For Dove, it's a good night if they go somewhere. Now maybe they end up with some other guys just sitting around playing video games late at night or maybe they end up at an underage party, but it's "motion," it's life, it's denial. And as long as Dove can deny, he's living it up.

Amber knows there's nothing going on. That's how she ends up engaged. Nothing going on and nothing's ever going to change that. Then Nate's back in town. For however long. Amber's forever on the precipice, Danwood conveys that perfectly. Will she stay with what she's settled for or chose something else? (Hopefully something else would not be limited solely to choosing Nate. If Amber could make that leap, you think she'd be able to leap a little further as well and actually have a dream.)

Nate's parents dream. And scheme of ways to enliven their sex lives. Of ways to restart their marriage. Mainly, they just fool themselves. They're stuck with each other so they fool themselves that they're other people, celebrities, when they're having sex.

Everyone in the town is fooling themselves except Nate and Dean has a wonderful of looking and moving his head away from what he's still looking at. If that's not a personal trait of the actor's, he's made a wonderful acting choice. (If that is a personal trait, he was wise to use it.) Nate's back with fresh eyes. He knows there's more but he, like his eyes, is drawn to the town in a sick love/hate kind of manner.

Nate's always on the verge of exploding captures that as well. The show is a combination of scripted sitcom and improvised sitcom. That may be why everyone, not just Dean who anchors the show, seems to be playing a person and not a stereotype. They're fleshing out the characters as they flesh out the scenes. And this improvisation works especially well for Allan Havey who plays Nate's father.

Havey's improvised lines are often the funniest dialogue in each episode. Whether due to the fact that he's coming up with them or because that's how he sees the character, Havey's captured the desperation of the deep denial Bob lives in.

Loretta Fox has been less successful as Margo early on, but Margo had a nice moment in the ktichen with Nate's aunt Lousie in one episode and last week, as Margo attempted to drug her hospitalized husband to get him to repeat the nice things he'd said when she wasn't around earlier, where she got to shine.

Early on, however, she came off like one more bland TV mother that they'd added sexual issues too. Bob and Margo are in couples' therapy to save their marriage, they're pretending that each other is someone else (and asking Nate for suggestions of who they should pretend they're with instead of each other). There's a desperation to Margo and it doesn't have to be on full display but there were times where you wondered if Fox got how desperate the character she was playing was?

It can take time to settle into a role and, hopefully, that is happening now and why Fox has had her moments in the last two shows.

So which is it? Arrested Development or The War At Home? The War At Home is every sitcom stereotype recylced and photocopied from a photocopy of a photocopy. It's Married With Children if it had drug on for ten more years. Translation, you're not seeing anything new and you're not hearing any jokes that are new.

Free Ride's not that. It's also not Arrested Development which worked much more as ensemble.
The lead characters of this show are Nate and Johnson City. Their eyes are locked on one another and neither intends to blink first. But someone will come out on top. Nate's too aware and Johnson City too dependent upon complacency.

If Fox renews the show, this will be one to watch. Fox stuck with The War At Home and cancelled Arrested Development. Free Ride may be too good of a show to last.