This is one half of a dueling column about NBC’s new half-hour romcom A to Z. See our pro-A to Z argument right here.
When I initially read the premise of A to Z, I had my doubts, but it wasn’t until watching the pilot that I was able to pinpoint my first big problem with this show – it’s trying to be How I Met Your Mother. It’s so heavy-handed that I was actually shocked – I’ve never encountered a television pilot that was so obviously created as an attempt to piggyback off of the success of another recently-finished show. As the show starts, we are immediately told – via voiceover from the future (Katey Sagal, don’t you have something better to do?) – the length of Andrew and Zelda’s relationship, as the show attempts to get you invested in the mystery of what happens after that end date – do they break up, if so, why, what happens? Does one of them die? Do they get married?
It might just be me, but unless there’s a huge happily ever after, this signals an even more disappointing and depressing finale than How I Met Your Mother’s badly received ending – and it isn’t as if this is a bitter HIMYM fan talking. I hated the little I saw of How I Met Your Mother and there’s no way I’m going to be sucked in by a bad bootleg version of it. But come on. The lead male actor, Ben Feldman, is basically Ted Mosby 2.0, and the lead female, Cristin Milioti, is literally The Mother – in case the show hadn’t made it obvious enough that it was hoping to fill the gap in the lives of HIMYM fans looking to repeat the unsatisfying experience. They’re trying so hard that I’m kind of embarrassed for them.
That first point alone would be enough for me to tune out, but ripping off How I Met Your Mother isn’t A to Z’s only failing. Andrew and Zelda are a couple of white kids who look so alike they probably could have played twins in a different show, but worse than that is the way the characters are set up as oh-so-unstereotypical of their respective genders. The show tries for a few laughs about each character’s supposedly unusual career – “guys-guy” Andrew who’s a closet romantic and works for an online dating site, and “girly-girl” Zelda, who’s a pro bono lawyer. Zelda, in particular, suffers – Andrew doesn’t seem terribly out of place at Wallflower, but each time we see Zelda working, they seem to be going for cute caricature – cool to know it’s 2014 and these people still haven’t learnt anything from Legally Blonde.
The show tries too hard to shove this idea of “I’m normal! I’m so cookie-cutter normal! But I’m Different! I have Other Sides!” – god forbid that these characters have a bit of natural complexity. In this day and age, we’ve latched on to romantic comedies like New Girl and The Mindy Project where people in their 20s and 30s demonstrate the fact that everyone in this world is totally weird. There’s no song and dance about how someone breaks the mold because we’ve accepted that there is no mold – so it’s quite jarring to watch a show like A to Z attempt to shove characters back into one.
The cast of supporting characters is also a disappointing lot – Lenora Crichlow was the only part of the show I was looking forward to, because I love her, but her role as Stephie, Zelda’s law school friend who becomes a carbon copy of whichever guy she’s currently dating, was disappointing. Andrew’s boss Lydia is abrasive to the point of startling, and his best friend Stu was one of the most unlikeable characters I’ve seen on TV in a while – his behaviour made me uncomfortable. The pair of programming nerds at Wallflower just made me sad – once again, it’s 2014, and your handling geek or fandom subculture is reading like it was written in 1999. There were one or two shining moments of naturalistic dialogue – unfortunately, rarely delivered in sequence – but in general the writing was clunky at best and offensive at worst (“It was her in the silver dress. She just remembers it wrong.” “Don’t women usually remember what they wore to stuff?”) with the strange joke about Zelda’s potential bisexuality (spoiler, she’s not) being a real low point. If that was an attempt at inclusiveness, you’re definitely doing it wrong.
To add insult to injury, the plot went from uninterestingly sweet to creepy and mildly unhealthy fairly quickly. After Andrew and Zelda meet at their office park, become friends and go on a date, where they discover that Andrew thinks he saw Zelda at a gig years ago and that they’re meant to be – that he saw their whole lives in that moment. This, naturally disturbs Zelda and she leaves, and maybe things would have been okay, and presented a nice message about making your own fate, if they’d moved on from that factor and just dated anyway, but no – Andrew pursues the situation by having his programmers stalk Zelda online to prove “the girl in the silver dress” was her. There’s a touch of Dharma and Greg – a show I admittedly loved – with Andrew’s whole fate/meant to be thing, but when seeing the man as the believer and the woman as the skeptic, you’re faced with the reality that it’s stalky and weird and entitled and uncomfortable and threatening.
Zelda has some rightful fury over discovering this, but then has a change of heart and chooses to nervously call Andrew – and beg for his forgiveness! – because apparently all she took away from Stephanie’s perfectly reasonable rant about Andrew being creepy as hell was that no guy has ever tried that hard for her before. Zelda, girl, what? What is this choice you are making? It’s revealed that she actually was the girl in the silver dress and that she feels bad about lying to him, but, I mean, if some strange dude basically stalks you to prove you’re meant to be together, there is absolutely no reason for any woman to feel bad about lying to get him off your back. Zelda runs herself into the ground, backs down, places no blame on Andrew for being creepy, and makes their whole falling out her fault, and I felt really confronted and unhappy watching a female character act like that in response to a man whose behaviour was intrusive, unwanted and line-crossing, fate or no fate.
The end of the episode is the start of the couple’s dating journey, of 8 months, 3 weeks, 5 days and one hour, as promised. I hope they break up.