Marry Me

Marry Me is the rarest of commercial TV sitcoms in that it's actually funny, has two standout leads and a superb supporting cast (especially Meadows and Bucatinsky).

Taken on its own, Marry Me offers a fast-moving, often hilarious debut episode that traffics in pop culture references as it establishes Annie as the loon and Jake as the tolerant, abiding guy who loves her.

Though I’m not in love with the idea of another sitcom in which a woman fixates on engagement rings and wedding planning, it’s impossible to resist the fluidly written, sharply performed quips and pop-culture references that are effortlessly strewn across Marry Me’s pilot episode.

At its best the show’s language is inventively and diversely funny, drawing laughs in two or three or four different ways within the space of seconds.... There are moments, though--and they come more often as the episode goes along--when the tone turns a little more earnest and brushes up against the sentimental.

The pilot is high-strung but basically acceptable, and I'll keep watching in the well-founded hopes that it will find consistently entertaining groove and use its fine cast (which includes Tim Meadows and Dan Bucatinsky as Annie's dads) as well as "Happy Endings" used its fab ensemble.

In some ways, the show is a throwback to the days of wacky female sitcom stars with a lot of physical humor. What’s lacking is charm and lovability.

We don’t dislike Annie or Jake. It’s just really hard to imagine where else Marry Me could go from here, and harder to imagine why we would care.