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 20th.
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.
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.
 |
| 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 |
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 |
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.
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 |
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.
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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