3 out of 5

Created by: Lake Bell and Elizabeth Meriwether

Charmingly, dumbly goofy, with a great comedic cast, Bless This Mess’ standard ‘fish(es) out of water’ setup is buoyed by an appreciated awareness of modern humor, leaning in to its standardness and potshots at millennials by mining both classic tropes and a non-sequitor mentality.

Loving Lake Bell’s work on Childrens Hospital, I admittedly missed out on the million things she did between now and then but it was enough to get me interested to see her here, and she doesn’t disappoint with her comedic timing: paired with Dax Shepard, the duo play a city husband and wife who decide to ditch it all and start a farm in Nebraska and go green and raise chickens and porch sit and all that and life is grand.

But of course, it doesn’t turn out that way.  The locals (a set of wonderfully gifted, and always fun to watch actors: David Koechner, Lennon Parham, Ed Begley Jr) are rather dismissive of the kids who think they can just move to town and use the internet to figure out this farmin’ thing, and the house is a fixer-upper to the extreme, and a drifter uses their bathroom, and nothing grows on their soil…

Some light banter regarding male and female roles is wended throughout, deep enough to not be surface but remaining on the side of humorous, and no surprises are had when hubbie and wife each find their own form of confidants in town and slowly but surely find something, of the course of six amusing episodes, that amounts to their own ‘place.’  Naturally, they’ll be staying to give an honest go of the farming thing, and we get a second season of probably similarly enjoyably harmless antics.