Party Girl

Full of snap and sass -- and actual laughs, too -- and one wonders whether it's safe to become attached to it. [9 Sept 1996, p.]

Party Girl exudes a certain clunky charm - much more so than the 1995 film that inspired it. It's not a perfect show, but it works for its occasional laughs, which is more than can be said about most new comedies so far this season. [9 Sept 1996, p.C10]

The problem is that self-styled bohemians, including sidekicks like a fey fashion photographer (John Cameron Mitchell) and a dumb-hunk bartender (Matt Borlenghi), hardly look natural delivering glib one-liners and performing slapstick spit-takes. [9 Sept 1996, p.3D]

Aside from Kurtz, everything else in this makeover is about the same. That's not good.[9 Sept 1996, p.1]

More manufactured silliness than genuine comedy; Party Girl is a theme in search of laughs. Once again TV borrows from a big-screen film, with Party Girl appropriating the premise of the motion picture of the same name. Yet whereas the film had a loose-limbed loopiness to it, a quirky affability that imparted to its actions something greater than the sum of its parts, the video Party Girl largely lacks wit or snap, and the effort generally amounts to a lackluster pastiche of shticky kitsch.

Disaster pretty much sums up Party Girl, judging from its first two shows...The performers seem game enough, but they are utterly undone by material that gets stuck at the intersections of body parts. [9 Sept 1996, p.78]

According to the laugh track, this is one seriously funny half-hour. Obviously, it knows something I don't. This isn't a sitcom, or even a comedy with a plot; it's a series of mostly lame one-liners. It's a comedy that mistakes smirks for laughs. Bet you don't even crack a smile. [9 Sept 1996, p.6D]