Is There Another Flight I Can Catch? No? You Sure? #LAtoVegas #3weekroundup #recap #review #FOX

Is There Another Flight I Can Catch? No? You Sure? #LAtoVegas #3weekroundup #recap #review #FOX

All pictures courtesy of FOX 

Boy, I guess my brain is just taking its dear, sweet time with getting back into the groove of things after such a long layoff. There are literally only, like, four or five new mid-season shows I’ll be reviewing and this is the second, yet it feels like the 20^th. I’m already tired of watching new stuff, though that may be because I haven’t found a diamond in the rough yet. Still, my sluggish start to 2018 does not bode well for my upcoming projects this year, including season two of Extraordinary and the release of my mystery novel The Man On The Roof—look for those soon on Amazon Kindle. Anyway, we’re back with another new show (almost all the new shows are on FOX. Hmm? Interesting...) on FOX. Will this new half-hour comedy make a smooth landing into your heart or will it pull a Sully and have to crash-land in the Hudson before slowly sinking into the deep fridgid waters? Let’s find out together!

FOX’s LA to Vegas is an airplane workplace comedy about the pseudo-famous weekly flight from LA to Vegas. For those not in the know, there really are groups of people that hop onto a plane every weekend in LA and fly to Vegas, returning Sunday night. A respite for some, business for others. I guess an East Coast equivalent would be those yuppies and hipsters that drive from Manhattan to the Hamptons every weekend during the summer—hey, Bravo’s Summer House, you equally trashy Guido-less version of Jersey Shore. Because it’s a constant flight that happens every weekend and it’s very cheap and easier than driving, you get a lot of the same people on the flight every single week, so we will have both crew and passengers as regulars on the show. This is a fictionalized depiction of the drama that could happen amongst them all!

First, let me start by saying that ye should be not fooled ye weary viewer. Though the always classy and talented Dylan McDermott is put front and center in most of the advertising for this show, he is not exactly the star of the show. It doesn’t center around him, but rather the lead stewardess Ronnie, played by former soap star Kim Matula. I’ll talk more about this discrepancy later, just know that I had to get used to it. We open episode one with Ronnie fumbling out of an Uber while leaving a message for a DELTA HR person about a recently vacated flight attendant position on their LA to JFK flight, all while she sprints through the airport getting dressed into her current stewardess uniform. (Note: This is a single-cam, no laugh track, no studio audience kinda comedy for those who didn’t know). She manages to get fully dressed, get on the plane and start welcoming passengers while explaining to her co-worker her dreams of grand travels around the world. LA to JFK can eventually lead to JFK to London which can eventually lead to London to somewhere Asian, and before you know it she’ll have trotted more globe than those B-ball players from Harlem. If she can just get that Delta job and ditch this rinky-dink unnamed airline she works for now.

Ronnie at left, Bernard at right 

Her coworker is Bernard, played by Nathan Lee Graham. He is the fiery, sassy black gay dude that embodies the thick card-stock 90s-version of a gay man. He’s supposed to be funny and we all know it, but somehow the shtick feels dated. Again, I’ll address this more later but just know there’s something off about him. Anyway, he both commiserates with her while also giving her a “girl, bye,” about her seriously thinking she’s going to get her grubby paws on that Delta job—not that he wants it for himself, but no way she’s on the radar.

They break from their coworker powwow so that we can meet our first main-player passengers beginning with Artem. Played by the familiar character actor Peter Stormare (Armageddon, Bad Boys 2, Minority Report), Artem is supposed to be some West European (maybe Russian) sleazy gambler who will take a bet on anything and is superstitious like all gamblers. His gripe: some grown baby-man is sitting in his lucky seat on the plane. The baby-man is sitting with his fiance as they are flying to elope in order to piss off her parents (Artem won that bet. It was either piss off parents or she’s knocked-up). Ronnie gets them to move by offering free beer to someone else who will give up their seat and at first a pregnant woman stands up and it’s supposed to be super funny but... Eh!

Nichole

Through the pregnant woman and the couple we meet another one of our main-player passengers in Nichole (with a damn H!). Nichole is a scripper. She scrips. For a living. That’s some southern accent humor for you. If you don't get it, fine! Anyway, she works at the strip club Grapefroots where she earns a helluva lot of money over the weekends making it bounce and wobble from dem dollas. The pregnant girl works with her, though she doesn’t become a series regular. Nichole (with a damn H!) tells the bride-to-be that she can also make it drop and wiggle for green stacks because a girl that looks like her is built for the pole... or the lap, whichever. Nichole also makes a commission off of each girl she brings in, kinda like a stripper-recruitment pyramid scheme.

Before Ronnie completed her quest to get the couple to move to new seats in order to satisfy Artem (the couple doesn’t care where they sit, so long as they stay together—awww! Young love is so sweet and stupid), she also ran into our third main-player passenger, the very British Colin. Colin is played by actor Ed Weeks who I guess may be new to the US market. I’m sure he’s been being British in other things but I haven’t seen him in anything I can remember, and I’ve clearly seen a lot of crap. Colin is both irritatingly proper and charmingly sarcastic, making it a very odd but mildly satisfying love interest for our long-suffering Ronnie to get internationally dirty on a domestic flight with. Ronnie and Bernard at first stand at front and wonder about who he is and why he’s traveling back and forth to Vegas every weekend because he doesn’t seem like the gambling or stripping type. His fictional, fantasized options: a failing spy, somebody in WITSEC or something else. In reality, he’s a professor at some college, but that still doesn’t explain why he’s flying back and forth which is later revealed.

Moving on, we finally round out the main cast with our cockpit heroes (Boom! Just gave you a perfect name for another comedy show and/or movie. You’re welcome, Hollywood) Alan, the co-pilot played by Amir Talai, and Captain Dave played by McDermott, finally! Alan is given little to nothing to do on the first couple of episodes and may never be given more than 10 lines on each episode. He exists almost solely to sit next to Captain Dave, look like a doofus, act like a dingus, and play beta-male to Captain Dave’s clear alpha sensibilities. He and Captain Dave have been going number one and two together for some time now, as evidenced by his lack of laughter at Dave’s overplayed joke about the flight from LA to Lost Wages! Yeah, it’s that bad. The stick belongs to Dave. The yoke belongs to Dave. Alan does not get to touch either and that is how it will always be.

Alan at left, Captain Dave at right

Captain Dave is a four-time divorced non-ladies-man ladies’ man that all the women want to be with simply so that they get experience in knowing the type of guy that they don’t want to be with. Almost every one of his ex-wives cheated on him, seemingly because he couldn’t get them to climactic heights on a frequent enough occasion, or because his ego was too big and other things not big enough. Still, does that stop him? Well, yeah, it probably stops him from doing a lot of things, but not from flying the pond-hopper that is LA to Vegas on a weekend-ly basis. Granted, he has to have a few drinks to fly or to do just about anything in his life, but he’s always good to go and always sorta-professional. A bevy of bad jokes, filled to the brim with alcohol, and a sweat of jubilant desperation always filming his body, Captain Dave is everybody’s bad uncle but in a plane captain’s uniform.

The flight filled with potential syphilis carriers finally takes off toward Vegas. It isn’t long into the flight before Ronnie learns that a fellow stewardess—some Asian chick—has already landed the Delta job behind her back. With her dreams crushed, Ronnie quits mid-flight and goes to sit down in the seat next to the professor who not only heard her and Bernard’s theorizing about who he is and what he does, but also logically explains how he thinks she made a terrible mistake because now she will have to pay for her flight back to LA and is in no better possession for a national flight than before. His logic infuriates her. So much so that they hurriedly scamper to the bathroom to make things super awkward and get a little strange and wet, which they do in a PG-13 sorta way. After there mile-high make out, they de-board never to see each other again... until the return flight on Sunday night. It’s only then revealed why he goes back and forth from LA to Vegas: he is married and has a young son. And Ronnie feels like an absolute peach about the situation.

While Ronnie is losing her shiznit on the Brit, Captain Dave is trying to find a bit of weekend glory as his life has dive-bombed in a most miserable way. He had hoped to flaunt his captain-of-the-air power by officiating an on-board wedding for that eloping couple in the same way a boat captain can marry off anyone at sea, but Ronnie informs him he has no such power. Then, on the return flight he manages to leg-lock that very same young, dumb baby-man when the guy comes back complaining about the flight and the passengers on it who convinced his girl that she wasn’t actually in love with him anymore—Nichole (with a damn H!) totally got that pyramid-scheme bonus. Captain Dave sneaks up from behind and subdues the kid who has threatened to do something really mean to the plane. Ronnie un-quits her job (never made it official) and commits to suffering in hopes of that one day. One day! And the Brit confesses that he has been separated from his wife because they went through a quickie Vegas wedding after a few Hangover-esque nights of wild times that accidentally produced a baby. He is in no way in love with that woman. Ronnie feels a little better about their in-air slobfest.

Episode two is about Captain Dave being chosen as one of the top 10 pilots to watch out for by some flyboy magazine, which he hopes really sticks it to his rival. But as the time draws near for him to do the photo shoot for the zine, he comes down with a severe case of the yips and, assumingly like in all of his past four failed marriages, can’t quite perform. The plane is up in the air and cruising on autopilot but no way in hell is he gonna be able to land this bird.

Meanwhile, Ronnie and Bernard are suffering through their own crisis. After handing out a coupon for Grapefroots to her seatmate, Nichole discovers that the old man has died on her shoulder. Per airline and FAA rules and regulations, a person cannot be legally pronounced dead until on the ground. Ronnie and Bernard don’t want to freak-out the passengers, so they (Nichole helps) try to pretend the man is just sleeping until doofus Alan comes out from the cockpit and mistakes the old white dead guy for another old white alive guy and announces that there is a dead guy onboard. And who wants to ride around with a dead guy? So Nichole has to enlist the help of British bloke Colin to help her carry the body to the front for no apparent reason other than to set up the pratfall of Alan when he is summoned to the front to land the plan. Alan trips over the dead guy and smacks into the cockpit door, knocking himself out. So Ronnie has to go into the cockpit and convince Captain Dave that he can land the plane, and simultaneously she has to explain why she failed to show up for a date with Colin after their misunderstanding got understood. Her explanation: She just couldn’t because he scared her with all of his overbearing, polite Britishness. But carrying a dead body together changed things and once the captain does land the plane, she is totally ready for a real relationship. And now Colin agrees with her that they shouldn’t be in a relationship, and she’s lost her chance. It’s DELTA’s LA to JFK all over again!

Episode three finally introduces us to Captain Dave’s nemesis. Upon coming into work with an injured wrist that he claimed he hurt while trying to lift an armoire off of someone, Dave suffers through Bernard calling it into the airline. They quickly send a replacement in Captain Steve, a man who flies international (LA to Canada) and who is married to a model (a catalogue model an internet catalogue model). Dave hates him because he finished at the top of their flight school and beat him out for multiple routes in their time as professional pilots. So the last thing he wants to see is this man take another win by doing a better job than he ever could. At first the crew are enamored by him. Ronnie thinks he’s a hunk of a man, ditto Bernard and even Alan thinks he’s cool. In fact, they could get used to flying with him, and Steve brags about maybe taking over LA to Vegas for an easier workload. They’d at least never have to check Dave’s hair for grays anymore or baby him about his terrible jokes and drinking. But when Steve cracks the whip and insists that they are terrible at their jobs.

Bernard and Ronnie then unite with Dave in operation: Get Steve Off LA to Vegas. Riding as a passenger, Dave tells Steve to ease up on his crew but Steve ain’t hearin’ it and says that he’ll have them fired if he takes over. Dave then turns on the plan when he learns that he can take over Steve’s international flights if Steve takes his LA to Vegas. Still, Ronnie and Bernard are like family, so he sticks up for them again only for Steve to reveal that he was never serious about taking over LA to Vegas. Hell, the dude flies international. International! So, all is saved as far as flights go.

Left to Right: Captain Dave, Ronnie, Colin

On the ground, Colin struggles to throw his son a really cool Vegas birthday party but is thwarted when the place he booked was previously used by an anti-vaccine parent and now has a super-virus or something. Ronnie hooks him up with Artem who knows people in Vegas. Artem takes him to a nice indoor playhouse of sorts only for the budget to balloon to a few thousand dollars. So Colin and Artem end up at Grapefroots where Nichole (with a damn H!) welcomes them to throw the party on Sunday because it is a dead day anyway. The kids have fun sliding down the pole, have condom-balloon animals and even get to pet a man dressed as a dog who is the slave to his dominatrix mistress. It’s the best b-day party ever!

What’s my score? I give this a C. This show is dumb, OK? Like, seriously dumb. It reminds me of a defunct show from about ten or 15 years ago called The Loop where the comedy elicits more head shakes and “this is stupid” comments than actual laughs, yet I liked The Loop. This? Eh! Take it or leave it. I don’t think it’s as smart as Brooklyn-9-9 but I don’t watch that either. And it’s definitely no New Girl. The funny thing is that every situation, so far, has been pretty realistic. Can I believe that a pilot would get the yips, a guy would die in flight, an eloping couple would break up and the girl would run off to be a stripper? Yes. It’s all happened before. Yet, there is something so very inauthentic/unfunny about the show. I think that it fails to properly balance or even have some kind of emotional weight to any of the episodes. One of the reasons why most comedies in the past were successful was because they had at least one “aww” moment either per episode or per every two episodes. That moment when the audience stops, the plot slows and a real connection is made between the characters and the viewers, either exploring some kind of meaningful topic or hitting on something revealing about the characters. But with most single-cam shows of the last decade, they fail to do this unless they are strictly about families. Even then it’s difficult. With the exception of Seinfeld which never had to have an aww moment, many of today’s comedies go strictly for the laughs without establishing any personal connection. Such is the problem with this show.

Have you ever been watching a comedy or any kind of movie and thought, “Wow! This seems like it should be good and I should be more into it but I’m just not.” The jokes could even be funny or the action pretty good but you just don’t feel a thing? That’s sorta this show. And it’s really no more epitomized than by the character of Bernard. It’s rare that after spending a few weeks/episodes with a show (or a movie) that I can’t figure out what it is that either I or some other viewers won’t/don’t like about something, yet here I am with Bernard. I can’t figure out if I don’t like the actor, don’t like the way he’s playing the character, don’t like the way the character is written or just don’t like the dialogue for the character but something is painfully off about him to me. This is not a Seth MacFarlane/Orville problem where if you get rid of him the entire show becomes exponentially better, but Bernard currently doesn’t feel like he fits with the rest of the cast. Don’t get me wrong, some of the lines they’ve written for him are quite funny if not new, but they don’t make me want to laugh. It’s almost as if every line he says he knows is funny, but he doesn’t want you to laugh because he’ll then feel laughed at. I don’t know, it just feels strange. It doesn’t fit with everyone else.

Speaking of casting, I have to say that I was a little disappointed when I realized that McDermott really wasn’t the full-on lead. Again, you can usually tell who the star of a show is by who they open up on and whose private life is explored more. Ronnie gets both the opening shot and gets all the questions about her private life explored on a continual loop for the first three episodes. You have all the answers to her major questions by the end of episode four (yes, I watched four eps instead of just three but only covered three per my usual): she’s single, she wants to travel the world, she’s socially open to dating but kinda has a crush on British guy which is really complicated, she is nosy and thinks she’s a do-gooder, she once had an affair with a married man and et cetera. McDermott you hardly know anything about except that he is a lush with ex-wives who thinks he’s better than he is. Does he have kids? Why did he move to LA? What does he do when in Vegas? Who knows. Again, not hating because the woman who plays Ronnie is quite charming and good, but for those tuning in solely for McDermott (me at first), temper your expectations. You get him, but he’s more of a co-lead. Funny enough, this is a real tricky way to get women to top-line network shows. I digress.

Should you be watching? Eh! Probably not. It’s certainly not a family comedy and chances are good that if you’re single, you’re probably too busy with work or other shows that you feel a lot more comfortable with on Tuesday nights—a night with a glut of comedy already, with NBC’s reality game shows and ABC’s two-hour laugh block. It’s ultimately a forgettable show that tries but doesn’t try hard enough to exploit its novel idea. I’ve called many a show and movie forgettable before and some have turned out to be good or stick around longer than I hypothesized they would, but I would say that this one does not supply you with any joke or comedic setup that you’ll be talking about the next day at work or tweeting about with your buddies that aren’t currently already watching the show. Sorry, but I’d expect a lot more from producers Adam McKay and Will Ferrell. Oh, did I bury the lede there? Oh well! LA to Vegas airs on FOX Tuesdays at 9:00pm, right before The Mick. You can catch up with the first four episodes on FOXonDemand or at FOX.com now.

What do you think? Have you heard of LA to Vegas? If not, do you think you’ll tune in for an episode or two now? If you have heard of it, have you seen it? Do you like it? Was I too harsh on it? Is it your new favorite show? And what crazy shenanigans do you want to see happen to the crew and passengers of the flights? And when will Colin and Ronnie hook up again? Let me know in the comments below.

Check out my 5-star comedy novel, Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend. #AhStalking. If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinary on Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.

Until next time, “Do you fly often?”

'No, I... don't have wings.'

P.S. That's a little Airplane humor for you. See, the sneaky part about it is that it's not an actual quote from the Airplane films. Sure, I could've used the most quoted quote from the overly quotable film, but I didn't. So... yeah. I'll think of a better sign-off next time.

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