Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Bite-Sized Review: Enlisted

Fox's Enlisted (premiered tonight) crackles with opportunity. It's not a great episode, but it is a good pilot. We get a sense of who the characters are, what type of adventures they'll have each week, and a smidgen of emotional weight.

Plus, it's pretty damn funny. Ron Funches and the rest of the supporting cast are immediately memorable. They avoid any of the obvious jokes, usually steering away from the first choice and instead looking for the second or third option. Keith David is tasked with some dramatic heavy lifting, but also gets a chance to crack a good joke or two.

And in keeping with Fox's new push for diversity, we've got an actually diverse cast without tripping over itself in self-congratulations.


The show's creator, Kevin Biegel, hails from Scrubs and Cougar Town. And Enlisted is very much a spiritual successor - wacky hijinks melded with surprisingly subtle and nuanced character work on the inside.

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