Critic Reviews

The team behind Bad Teacher has successfully reconfigured the raunchy comedy into a heart warming sitcom starring Ari Graynor that is still bad in all the right ways. [28 Apr 2014]

It’s bright, sharp, without a laugh track and with a very well assembled ensemble cast headed by Ari Graynor in the Diaz role of a gold-digging, dumped divorcee looking to land another big fish.

All in all, it's a pleasant, sunny and well-played ephemeral farce; Gilbert, Grier, Hansen and Davis are all good to see again, and Graynor inhabits her character with verve and increasing grace.

Its kindly spirit and those performances [from Graynor, Hansen and Grier] help prevent Bad Teacher from falling into the increasingly raunchy trap of its network predecessor, “Two and a Half Men.”

Despite the structural problems, there are considerable delights in each one of these episodes. All of them contain a handful of belly laughs, and the dialogue is sharp and pointed even when it’s not riotously funny.

Meredith is a gold-digger, but when push comes to shove she chooses her students’ welfare over her ambition to become someone’s new wife. That is a pat resolution in a movie but not enough to sustain a series.

Adapted by Hilary Winston from the movie, the show quickly falls into a predictable pattern.... Still, taken on its own terms, the series is pretty amusing.

As is so often the case, the premiere episode tries too hard and isn’t as funny as it could be. The writing loosens up later on, and has some charm.

There’s warmth and some humor here. It’s also been tweaked so that, unlike the movie, it isn’t only for teens. But Bad Teacher has a tough test ahead.

On the whole, Bad Teacher is a pleasant, unremarkable adaptation of a middling Cameron Diaz vehicle that, in the translation from standalone film to series television (and, specifically, to CBS), loses whatever teeth the movie had.