Insights into Irrelevant Television

Traffic Light versus Perfect Couples

My all-time favorite show, Two and a Half Men, with its Jason Voorhees-esque ability to stick around, had to go on a brief production hiatus because one of its stars, Charlie Sheen, needed a little "me time."  So I thought I would check out a few of the other shows out there.  I have my Tivo set to automatically record anything that has any remotely hot women in it, and while I may miss a few shows because my standards are evidently lower than my Tivo's, I usually do alright sifting through the 40 terabytes of additional storage I have hooked up to my box.

Through pure happenstance, I watched two particular mid-season replacements back to back.  Perfect Couples and Traffic Light are both shows featuring an almost identical casts of early 30-somethings in almost identical places in their lives going through a few identical comedy bits. 

Tough thing for me is that I haven't laughed once during either of the two episodes of Traffic Light that I've seen, and given my penchant for CBS sitcoms, I'll obviously laugh at anything.  Even when I'm sober, I'm a wet dream for stand-up comedians doing their Laugh Factory Comedy Central specials because I nearly piss myself from moment one (I guess I'm basically the same drunk, just more handsy).  Starting the tired routine about how men and women differ?  Totally there.  Stole a joke from Dane Cook?  No problem.  Laughed the first time, still going to laugh now. 

So for a sitcom not to illicit a single laugh from me over the course of two episodes is disturbing.  Maybe they could call it Law and Order: Traffic Light, rebrand it as a cop show, and save some jobs.  The heart-string twist at the end of the pilot felt like it was meant for another series and rubber cemented onto this show.

Perfect Couples has a few more episodes under its belt, so while it also did not illicit a single laugh from me in the first two shows, I've gotten an isolated snort here and there from later episodes.  Perfect Couples goes a little further with the stereotypical archetypes, and that helps separates it from the cast of Traffic Light, which so far has been the TV equivalent of sodium-free soup.  Perfect Couples also has a foxy ace up its sleeve and her name is Olivia Munn.  Always thought she was stunning, but I genuinely consider her a pretty funny personality as well.  Traffic Light has no answer for Munn, and therefore I have to give this round of Insights into Irrelevant Television to Perfect Couples.

Now onto a Keeping Up With the Kardashians sorbet to cleanse the palate.