Enlisted
Created by Kevin Biegel
Airs Friday nights at 9:30pm on FOX
Watched for review: first two episodes, “Pilot” and “Randy Get Your Gun”
The first two episodes of Cougar Town co-creator Kevin Biegel’s new comedy Enlisted start off pretty inconspicuously, establishing itself as a fairly broad blend of workplace and family humor, mixed with the trademark slapstick, occasionally surrealist humor familiar to fans of Cougar Town and Scrubs (which Biegel previously worked on). But as both “Pilot” and “Randy Get Your Gun” continue, they reveal themselves to be something a little deeper and more serious than the jokes of the episodes otherwise suggest: Enlisted is not just about a family of soldiers, but about what it means to be a soldier in the Army, and the effects of having such a career.
Enlisted takes place on a Florida Army base, where the Rear Deployment Unit spends their days cleaning tanks, delivering care packages, and keeping their fingers crossed they don’t get deployed overseas. Predictably, it features ragtag group of goofy characters around the brotherly trio of Randy, Derrick, and Pete Hill, from an angry divorcee, to the eternally creepy Dobkiss and his random bouts of weirdness. Through two episodes, there obviously hasn’t been a lot of time to develop these characters, but the vibe is very much in the style of ancillary characters on Biegel’s work with Bill Lawrence: each has a trait that provides an avenue for comedic opportunity, be it throwaway jokes as the camera pans past them standing at attention, or recurring jokes throughout the 13-episode first season.
That Enlisted feels so familiar in its first two episodes is no surprise: there isn’t anything particularly unique about the show or its world presented to us in the show’s first hour, save for it being set on a military base. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a show without a whole lot of promise: the latter halves of both “Pilot” and “Randy Get Your Gun” dig deeper into the Hill brothers, whether it’s hinting towards Pete’s struggles to re-acclimate himself to life back in the US after long tours in Afghanistan, Derrick entering the Army to fit in with his family, or whether Randy should be a soldier at all, even if it’s a job that makes him happy. When Enlisted digs into these deeper – and frankly, darker – themes, it turns what would normally be used as comedic material and creates a meaningful bit of character with it (“Randy Get Your Gun” does a really great job of this with both Randy and Derrick, especially in their final scenes together).
Like most promising young comedies, Enlisted is still finding its rhythm after two episodes, with a lot of hit-or-miss jokes and some “will they, won’t they” that feels more obligatory than organic (and makes Sgt. Perez’s character pretty one-dimensional early on). But it’s already got a great grasp on its main characters, and shows a desire to explore some of the emotional and mental stress that being a soldier – be it one fighting in the trenches overseas, or one providing their families emotional support back home – can entail. With all the serial killers and groups of adults who clearly hate each other crowding up the television landscape, it’s always nice to see a show as openly optimistic and cathartic as Enlisted.
“Pilot” – B
“Randy Get Your Gun” – B+
What did you think of Enlisted? Leave your thoughts in the comments below – I’ll be sharing mine each Friday throughout the season.
Processed Media 