Aguy in a perpetual state of screw-up is at the center of CBS’s new comedy, and that’s Worst Week, an embarrassment farce that’s an American remake of a British comedy called Worst Week of My Life. It stars Kyle Bornheimer (Jericho) as well-meaning Sam, who has an adoring pregnant girlfriend, Melanie (Erinn Hayes), with uptight parents, Dick and Angela (Kurtwood Smith and Nancy Lenehan), who in the pilot endure the kind of domino-tipping catastrophe at the hands of their daughter’s boyfriend that might make you laugh, or might make you curl into a ball, eyes avoiding the screen, moaning in empathetic pain. I probably thought too much about how the various disasters could be avoided — the vomiting co-worker, the ruined turkey, the misunderstood undertaker — to really enjoy the show, even though it’s obviously well-made and Bornheimer has a flinty wit that prevents him from being just another Ben Stiller–ish sap. I’ve long had a weakness for mishap farce, from Laurel and Hardy to the Peter Sellers film The Party and through to the current vogue for foot-in-mouth disease that exemplifies The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm. But if I’m being truthful, the original British version of this series was funnier. It had a fractured elegance, pitched beautifully so that star Ben Miller’s fiascoes were funnier in the 100-meter stares they provoked from his victims. It was crumbling-Empire comedy at heart. I guess that makes CBS’s more hysterically pitched redo a metaphor for the stumblebum administration we’ve endured for eight years. Maybe if it’s a hit, it’ll act as a disaster-preparedness course for fuck-up-weary Americans. So when Angela reveals a painting of her beloved husband that she’s secretly commissioned by a renowned presidential portraitist, well-trained viewers’ minds will know that a Sam-generated fire is in its future.
THE MENTALIST | CBS | Tuesdays, 9 p.m.
GARY UNMARRIED | CBS | Wednesdays, 8:30 p.m.
WORST WEEK | CBS | Mondays, 9:30 p.m.
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