It’s a strange sensation to feel as if you’re observing yourself from outside of your body. Nowadays it’s called an “out-of-body experience” by chin-stroking, pensive-looking experts. I, on the other hand, call it “being forced to sit through Fox’s new sitcom, “Free Ride.”
Real World: Nate (Josh Dean) moves back in with his parents after graduating from college — big mistake. He now has to handle not only his parents, but also high school friends turned monster-truckers and brand-new crushes.
The show, which debuts March 1 at 9:30 p.m., centers around the laughably cliche plot of college graduate Nate Stahlings (Josh Dean) returning home to find that nothing is as he’s left it. His parents have transformed his room into a gym, forcing him to sleep in their cluttered garage. To make matters worse, he discovers that his parents are unsuccessfully attempting to salvage their marriage with therapy. I’m pretty sure that it was during their nonchalant talk of superimposing celebrity mugs over each other’s head to spice up their sex life that I witnessed my soul leaving my body.
What happened to the wacky inventiveness of Fox? Surely it could dig up better material than this hackneyed storyline. This is, after all, the same network that brought us “Celebrity Love Island” and a sporting competition between a group of midgets and a full-grown elephant in “Man vs. Beast.”
The fact that “Free Ride” is touting itself as a “partially improvised comedy” makes the show even more tragic because the writing is so devoid of any kind of humor that the actors are forced to revive it with their own. This becomes painfully obvious with the character of Mark Dove (Dave Sheridan), Nate’s former classmate and booze hound who cruises around in his self-designed monster truck, much to Nate’s awkward dismay. In Sheridan’s desperate attempt to resuscitate a long comatose script, he infuses his character with such an absurd, sophomoric personality (picture Keanu Reeves’ Ted “Theodore” Logan with half the IQ and as much inhibition as a teenage girl during Mardi Gras) that he becomes a one-dimensional character for whom you feel more disgust and pity than actual amusement. Next to his explicit, raucous persona, all other characters seem to fade into oblivion, including Nate.
In fact, “sophomoric” seems to be the recurring theme throughout a good portion of the sitcom. Nate’s romantic pursuit of another former classmate and current bank teller Amber Danwood (Erin Cahill) is awkward and clumsy. Despite the fact that Amber is engaged (to a typical jerk), she still can’t resist drawing attention to herself when the two accidentally bump into each other on their respective dates. Her obvious attempts to make him jealous, from sucking face with her fiancé mere inches away from Nate to “accidentally” dancing right into him and his girl, are so innately juvenile that you’re transported back to junior high. You half expect them to begin passing notes to each other in the next episode with the scrawled message “Do you like me? Circle yes or no, or maybe.”
If “Free Ride” had hoped to portray the comedic reality of life, it has failed miserably. Its jokes are nonexistent, its mind-numbing storyline is a basic cut-and-paste job taken from much more sophisticated shows and its characters range from ridiculous to borderline disturbing. If Fox wants romance, and absurd but “partially improvised comedy,” maybe it should stick with “Celebrity Love Island.”
