Why, God, Why?!

It's been a while since Whose Line Is It Anyway went off the air. Longer still since the original British incarnation of that show. And Drew Carey's Green Screen Show of a couple years back never really took off. In short, I was very interested to sample the new improv comedy show NBC debuted last night (ripped off from a foreign country, of course), Thank God You're Here.

I must regretably say that this is a poor substitute for any of those shows I named. It's not the fault of the "headlining" guest performers. In the debut episodes last night, Wayne Knight, Bryan Cranston, and Edie McClurg were particularly good, and nearly all the guests had good moments. No, the flaw was in the recurring performers, and the core premise of the show itself.

The key to good improv is to banish the word "no." That's the simple way of stating the principle at the heart of it all -- the good improv performers never reject something their fellow performers add to a scene, they incorporate it and continue to build the scene from there.

Well, Thank God You're Here may feature four guest actors every episode who are making things up as they go along, but the "regular performers" that populate all their scenes are rigidly on the rails. The producers/writers of the show concoct a laborious scenario for each one of the guests, and sprinkle it with touchstones that are not deviated from. If a performer introduces something funny, it will be bowled over and discarded by those playing from the "script" if it doesn't fit the destination for the scene. Again and again and again, the stock players on this "improv" show would tell the star performer "no," both figuratively and literally.

Edie McClurg, what incident is your husband alluding to in this couples therapy session? No, I think he means your affair with the gardener.

Richard Kind, what's your radio DJ name? No, actually it isn't.

Mo'Nique, please introduce the contestants on this game show you're co-hosting. No, actually, you got them completely wrong.

Jennifer Coolidge, tell us about the things you as a beauty pageant contestant would hope to accomplish if you won the title... but, of course you "mentioned earlier" that one of them had to do with nuclear proliferation.

Utter crap. It's an overused but apt metaphor to say that good acting is like a tennis match where the ball is expertly being volleyed back and forth between two people of amazing skill, and that's especially true in improv performances. Each guest actor on Thank God You're Here is facing off against a ball-serving machine. No matter how perfectly he returns the serve, it just comes to rest somewhere on the far side of the court, to be ignored as the next serve comes in.

The show occasionally rose to moments of comedy despite the ill-conceived set-up, but that is only a testament to how incredible some of the performers really are, and made me just sad to imagine how well they would have done in a real improvisational comedy performance.