Don't Go Out of Your Way to Watch TBS's 'Detour'
I will watch any show with Natalie Zea in it. Any time, any place, anywhere.
TBS’s new sitcom The Detour, which premieres Monday at 9 p.m. ET, makes that resolve a little harder to maintain.
Zea, I hasten to emphasize, is fine. She plays Robin, the wife of Nate (Jason Jones) and the mother of adolescents Delilah (Ashley Gerasimovich) and Jared (Liam Carroll).
The story, told with enough time-shifts that viewers may want to take motion sickness pills, has the family leaving Syracuse for a week’s vacation in Fort Lauderdale.
Comic disaster ensues immediately and relentlessly. Name something that can go wrong on a family road trip and you can start a pool on how soon it will happen here.
Bad roadside food? Check. Car stalls and starting it up makes the situation worse? Check. Meet disturbingly weird people? Check.
It sounds like National Lampoon’s Vacation. Creators Jones and Samantha Bee insist it is not. They insist it’s closer to a comedic Breaking Bad. When Nate’s going to get something thrown in his face, it’s not a slushie, it’s a cup of urine.
Now that scene, and others with the same comic DNA, might sound like they would define The Detour. If you find the notion funny, you’ll watch. If you don’t, you won’t.
It’s not quite that simple. The urine moment is just one part of an extended bizarre showdown triggered by a classic sitcom misunderstanding. Eventually it escalates to something that’s one part shock, one part satire and four or five parts absurdity.
To be fair, that larger context gives the actors a chance to show their comic chops, which they all have.
That said, bodily fluid and bodily function jokes are low-hanging comic fruit regardless of how they’re framed.
The Detour tries to break away from the Vacation model by adding a dark backstory for Jason. It seems he was fired from his job, which somehow is why they’re driving instead of flying to Fort Lauderdale, though it doesn’t explain why he didn’t tell Robin.
We ultimately do get most of the truth, thanks to the relentless time-shifting.
By then, however, it’s clear The Detour has two problems.
First, the characters just aren’t people we care that much about. That they’re all flawed is fine. That they all do and say stupid things is fine. So do the rest of us. We recognize that for all the wackiness, they love each other, and that’s the real family value, y’know?
But in the end, they just aren’t doing things that are engaging enough for us to watch, which brings us to the second problem.
The Detour wants us to think it’s hunting for humor in places most other sitcoms don’t go. In random moments this might be true. But with almost every setup, we know where the joke will be going before it gets there.
So even though The Detour doesn’t look like most other sitcoms these days, and even though it has Natalie Zea, it doesn’t have quite enough to say.
Or to laugh about.