First Impressions: Partners ‘Pilot’ – Having A Heart-On

The latest addition to CBS’s laughless Monday night lineup, Partners is created by the minds behind the terribly overrated Will & Grace (the early seasons, until they were pushed out by the network), and other stinkers like Good Morning and Four Kings. Built around the HILARIOUS premise of a gay/straight bromance (a barely adjusted concept of the creator’s failed 1990s comedy of the same title) Partners throws so many ‘big moments’ into its pilot, it forgets to tell jokes and develop characters.

How anybody could find relatable material in the show is beyond me. The show doesn’t bother to try and give the straight half of the pairing any kind of personality whatsoever: Joe isn’t so much a person, as he is a blob of skin that has stuff happen to him. He’s got a gorgeous girlfriend Ali (the lovely Sophia Bush) who he clearly doesn’t deserve, spending the pilot trying to break up with her, then suddenly proposing to her in a moment of inspiration. He goes from scene to scene with Ali and his gay counterpart Louis that nobody can get a feel for who he is – which leaves the emotional notes of the end of the episode feeling empty and orchestrated to fit the demands of the pilot.

The star of the show of course, is Louis, a twitchy, flamboyant sociopath who meddles in the lives of others and parades around screaming “ME, ME, ME!!!” – seriously, Michael Urie handles the part like he’s a flaming unicorn on bath salts, flailing his limbs around to no comedic effect, while his eyes are in constant ‘bug out’ mode. You’d think the gay co-creator of the show would want to do anything but paint his on-camera character with something besides the gay equivalent of black face (rainbow face?), but Louis just shouts things like “If this isn’t about you or me in five seconds, I’m going to eat my fist (makes sassy, angry gay face)… don’t even go there.”

Here’s a bad sign: if your show doesn’t inspire laughs of any kind from anything, there probably isn’t much to go on. And if the emotional notes fail – of which there are many, many swings and misses – then the show is an empty hole. If the show would’ve taken a couple episodes to establish some relationships, the audience might be able to buy into some of the struggles Ali and Joe are having (and give us some idea why they keep Louis in their lives), and we could possibly begin to care about him.

But CBS isn’t looking for anything original here (or they would’ve green lit a project for an ORIGINAL idea), and that lack of creativity turns Partners into an ugly affair rather quickly. Not even Sophia Bush’s screen charisma couldn’t save the most painful scenes, where Ali and Joe establish a life-altering relationship on some of the hokiest bullshit I’ve ever seen on TV (he doesn’t want to get married, and she doesn’t want to rush him, but they just know they want to be together).

The pilot ends with Wyatt (the cardboard Brandon Routh), Louis’s gay nurse boyfriend (big surprise, right?) telling Ali and Joe (two characters he hasn’t had any scenes with, save for telling Joe that Louis is somehow a redeemable person because “he has a heart”) that they’ll be together forever because “their love is true.” Do I really need to say anymore?

Grade: F

Other thoughts/observations:

– this show is terrible. Really just terrible.