The CW’s No Tomorrow unveils the latest clever disguise in which television tries to slip us a rom-com.
Nor does the network need to apologize. No Tomorrow is winning and endearing.
It has just one problem, which is that recent television history suggests rom-coms are a tough sell in almost any costume.
Let’s hope this one defies the trend because Evie (Tori Anderson, top) and Xavier (Joshua Sasse, top) make a swell couple and they’re surrounded by family and friends who run the whole gamut from quirky to zany.
For a disguise, they have a light coat of fantasy sci-fi.
Evie is a repressed wage slave, a smart woman trapped in a dead-end job because she’s afraid to try breaking out.
She has the same problem in her love life, where she’s about to get a proposal from Timothy (Jesse Rath), a terminal nerd who’s about as interesting as a Pokemon Go icon.
With her mother and sister cheering “Timothy! Timothy!”, Evie is about to let herself be shoved into a lifetime of dull.
And then comes Xavier.
Their meeting isn’t exactly accidental, it turns out, but however it happens, it works after the predictably bizarre introductory encounter.
Xavier believes the world will end in eight months and 12 days, smashed into oblivion by an asteroid, and he has a long Powerpoint presentation in support of this belief.
Alas, we never get to see all of it, because Evie turns out to be just the latest person who begs him to stop after the first few slides.
So she doesn’t quite come on board with the end of days. She does find herself intrigued with Xavier’s practical response to his conviction: that everyone should pack as much life as possible into their few remaining months.
Since Evie has packed as little life as possible into her previous 20-plus years, she starts to wonder, almost imperceptibly at first, if she should maybe sign on to that part of Xavier’s program.
First test: Will she, at Xavier’s urging, write down an apocalyst, including all the things she secretly yearns to do or simply has dreamed of trying.
Once she does, we know she’s in, which is a good thing, because No Tomorrow would be paralyzingly dull if she just shrugged and went back to Timothy.
She does, however, seem to stick with her job, where her boss Deirdre (Amy Pietz) starts out as a bloodless tyrant and rather quickly flashes another whole side.
Exactly where No Tomorrow can go from here may be the salient question.
Its obvious antecedent, Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman in The Bucket List, was a wonderful romp whose ending we expected and accepted.
No Tomorrow seems to be gearing up for a romp, too. It just presumably is heading for a different place, with a different kind of camaraderie along the way.
In fact, that might be the other misdirection going on here. While the CW says it’s at least temporarily out of the half-hour comedy business, No Tomorrow wouldn’t have much trouble testing positive as a sitcom.
But then, neither would another CW drama, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and that’s a potentially good sign for No Tomorrow. The CW renewed Crazy Ex this year despite modest ratings because the network just thought it was a cool show.
At least out of the box, so is No Tomorrow.