The precision exuberance of Vanessa Bayer hooks you into this sitcom – and its super-fun backstage bitchiness keeps you watching
Childhood cancer survivor Joanna Gold (Vanessa Bayer) is still living a forcibly sheltered life with her parents in Cleveland when she auditions for and gets her dream job as a presenter/hawker on shopping channel SVN. A new life in Pennsylvania beckons, among the stars she grew obsessed with during the treatment that isolated her as a child. Alas, on her first day her product is switched at the last moment to a rancid pillow mist whose smell catches her off guard. Her expression is enough to get her fired by magisterially ruthless (“Don’t just walk up to her as if you’re a human being on the same level!”) CEO Patricia (Jenifer Lewis). What is a girl to do but play the sympathy card and pretend her childhood cancer has come back?
On paper, this Paramount+ sitcom is a tough sell. But, overall, it works. There might not be abundant belly laughs (though there are often great throwaway lines, such as assistant Darcy begging the CEO for time off to attend Graydon Carter’s barn warming on Martha’s Vineyard), but Bayer – on whose own story Joanna’s is based – keeps our sympathy throughout. Joanna clearly has star quality gone awry, warped by her early isolation into an irrepressible awkwardness that is equally endearing and cringemaking. When asked how she’s doing by a colleague she replies: “I’m hashtag-living, I’m hashtag-I’m-loving-it, ba-dum-pum-pum, yeah! Let’s all go down to the Micky D’s and get some cheesebuuuugaaaahs!” It takes forever. It is exquisite agony, but her appeal keeps you rooting for her. Possibly only a performer of Bayer’s precision ebullience could pull it off.
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