Bless This Mess

It is fully formed and funny, a dry contemporary comedy built on an old foundation.

Like Meriwether’s biggest hit, New Girl, the show balances old-fashioned sweetness with of-the-moment characters and cultural references; neither rural nor urban types comes across as caricatures. Best of all, Bell and Shepard make an utterly believable, sympathetic couple–one that is just beginning to understand what it really means to make a lifelong commitment.

It’s a solid 22 minutes of television ... But after less than a half-hour of setup, there’s no way of saying if the first season is richer or poorer than the sum of its parts.

Bell and Shepard are fun together, but their enthusiasm can’t quite distract from the fact that, for a show about a couple uprooting their livelihoods to move halfway across the country, the stakes here are remarkably low.

Much of the humor is of the predictable, fish out of water variety ... but “Bless This Mess” is at its funniest when it gets weird with characters like Rudy (Ed Begley Jr.), who lives in the couple’s barn, and Jacob (JT Neal), the dim-witted son of the neighbors.

[Bless This Mess] doesn’t embarrass itself here but also doesn’t do much to push the sitcom needle in a new direction.

Escapism has its place, but this feels more insubstantial than even the early-21st-century reality-TV version of this idea, "The Simple Life."