Mike & Molly

Melissa McCarthy and Billy Gardell star in a sweet, old-fashioned sitcom. [Sep 27 2010, p.55]

As a Chicago cop and a fourth-grade teacher falling in love despite their own insecurities, they make a sweet, relatable team.

There's enough comedy content in this first seating to warrant keeping Mike & Molly on the TiVo menu, even if it's not quite love at first bite.

It’s always been impossible not to like pretty much everyone on the show, and that remains true. But through no fault of the actors, or the writers, some of the freshness has faded. The setups here feel more like, well, setups.

The potential for cringeworthiness is high, and the pilot sometimes falls on the wrong side of the line between self-deprecatingly comic and just plain mean. But there's a real sweetness to the tentative romance brewing between Mike, the beat cop played by comic Billy Gardell, and Molly, an elementary school teacher (Melissa McCarthy).

The show seems sympathetic to them as far as it goes, but the fat humor is just predictable and lame.

There are a lot of fat jokes in Mike & Molly. Unfortunately, all of them are easy, most of them are stupid and worse than anything is that they are spewed in what is being spun as a sympathetic look at people with eating problems.