3 out of 5

Director: UK TV wubba (created by Bob Kushell)

Covers only season 1.

Way To Go is a great example of modern television – pushing boundaries, and yet proving that the jokes remain the same.  Whenever I mention my one television comedy mainstay – Always Sunny – people toss me the likely candidates of “oh, you’ll like…” and then it’s 30 Rock, or The Office, or etc.  While I completely agree that there are a tone of tonal crossovers, there’s a slightly more ‘challenging’ aspect to Sunny’s humor that I don’t find in the other shows.  That’s not to suggest that one show is better than the other, or funnier than the other, or even that Sunny is always 100% different – a sensibility it has floated in and out of as the show has grown – just that I can pitch 30 Rock or Arrested Development or even the flipside raunchier FX comedies like The League as being of a specific humor type, generally friendly to all comers of the modern meta humor generation.  (Not ignoring that Sunny has innate dumbass appeal to it, but that’s another rant.)

So: Way To Go is about three guys who, for one reason or another, need cash – to pay for school, to pay for debts, to pay for an upcoming baby – and stumble across a way of making that cash: an assisted suicide biz, one friend providing the tech know-how so that the suicider can pull the plug themselves, one friend providing the drugs, and one friend the link to new ‘clients.’  This is a comedy pitch that could only exist in the modern world, and it’s generated its share of controversy (just by default), but the show is pretty predictable in its treatment of death – using different character tropes to show flippancy, or greed, or guilt as appropriate.  Which is where the joke remaining the same comes into play.  The writers should get credit for keeping the premise believable and mostly respectable and, well, true.  There are people who want to die, and it’s nice to face that up front without dolling it up too much, although thus far we’ve stuck to the safer side of old folks with life-threatening diseases.  But that’s fine.  The show should get its feet wet before dipping in to depressives or whatnot, which, who knows if it’ll get further seasons to do that.  The respectable aspect comes from wringing the comedy not from the premise so much as the interplay with the characters – our bumbling straight man, who forms a relationship with the daughter of one of the ‘clients,’ our forever problem-aligned gambling addict (the practical comedy), and the buildup of lies required by our funnyman suicide machine inventor who’s, natch, married to a cop.  When the yuks do come from what they’re doing, it’s again generally with the praise of those they’re working with, in the sense that, chuckle, the machine didn’t work, and so now our Lou Gherig’s disease sufferer gets to shrug and offer one of our leads a joint.

But okay, despite the setup and the clever footing it entails and the nice look of the show (directed with that nifty BBC dry humor flair that caught on with our out-and-out comedies like Arrested Development but hasn’t yet worked its way to more casual comedies such as ‘Way’), there’s really nothing new here.  The character tropes are character tropes, the daughter-dating and policewoman-wife elements are typical calamity crossovers, and the built-in comedy (or tension, if the show was pitched differently) of trying to cover up the business leads to predictable jokes of what people have to do to keep a lie going.  The punchlines happen when you expect, and you’ve heard spins on these jokes before.  Is it still entertaining?  Does it still make you giggle?  Sure.  But though we may not use laugh soundtracks too much anymore and though our comedies have this built in awareness of the internet and memes and whatever else, there’s nothing differentiating most shows from the stuff we were watching 30 years ago.  If ‘Way’ gets a following and is willing to push itself outward into more uncomfortable territory, it might find a unique spot.  Until then, it’s only amusing.