Seemingly ignorant of the world just outside their bubbles, the citizens of Suburbia live in rows of identical houses. Everyone puts on a façade of normality. Nobody ever leaves their houses except to explore the area’s only two cultural staples: the country club and the mall. Excuse me, this is not what it’s like at all. Somebody better tell the creators of ‘Suburgatory’ that before the next episode airs.

Granted, the show is a satire, which gives it some more creative freedom to lampoon everyday cultural generalizations. However, it’s coming a little late to the game. The seven-season spanning ‘Desperate Housewives,’ also on ABC, is the best modern satire of suburban life. The high school caste system was expertly portrayed in 2004’s ‘Mean Girls.’ That means ‘Suburgatory’ better bring something new to the table.

Instead, the creators rip a page out of the ‘Mean Girls’ playbook by following a high school-aged, redheaded protagonist who moved to the suburbs from a very different location and has to hang around a blonde, ‘plastic’ girl and her airheaded, enabling mom. That seems eerily familiar. Also, actress Ana Gasteyer is in both ‘Mean Girls’ and ‘Suburgatory,’ making it even harder to differentiate the two plots. But it’s never a bad move to try and steal a portion of a very successful product’s audience.

Unfortunately, ‘Suburgatory’ just doesn’t have any real sting in its sum up of the ‘burbs. To set up the premise, Tessa, our 16-year-old protagonist and the show’s narrator, moves against her will from the city to the show’s titular hell after her single father finds an unopened box of condoms in her drawer and decides suburbia would be a much better place to raise a kid.

Of course, he is wrong, at least in Tessa’s opinion. It’s fair to have a character be upset about change, but Tessa comes off as downright hostile with her snarky comments on everything, making her extremely unlikeable.

The other characters are so flat they are almost not even worth talking about. The father is very nice. The neighbors are naïve and ignorant. The other high school girls are sluts. And the world goes around. The show wastes the talents of two top-notch comediennes, Cheryl Hines and Ana Gasteyer, on these less-than-humorous bits.

In fact, most of the show’s ‘jokes’ feel like observational comedy without a punch line. A few of Tessa’s super snarky observations: Everyone drinks sugar-free Red Bull, everyone is driven to the mall by their parents, everyone is scantily clad in skimpy clothing and every girl gets anose job. Notice the use of the word ‘everyone.’ These are broad generalizations, which target the central thesis of the show as being ‘everyone in the suburbs is really superficial and fake.’

And that’s it. The pilot is nothing but bit after bit revolving around that very idea. There’s no plot or arc to grab interest and no sentimental lesson to learn at the end. It’s just 30 minutes of jokes about how weird the suburbs are. We already know that, so why should we even be watching?

jswucher@syr.edu

Published on September 25, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Jeff: jswucher@syr.edu