This looked liked a decent concept and Melissa Fumero sold me on it. I loved her in Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
The writing on this first episode is awful. It's clunky, cliched, and forced.
I get that having to act to a bad script is hard, but Melissa does not look good doing it. She comes off as a really bad actor. Which is sad because I've seen her be good.
Randall Park wasn't fantastic, but he came off as competent.
How much did they have to throw at these actors to get them to agree to degrade themselves on such a lazy pilot script?
Ham-fisted is this writer's approach to this story. Backstory and exposition? Just shove that in anywhere. And let's not sprinkle it in in a natural way through, let's really try to pack as much info dump in as we can in the dumbest places among people that wouldn't talk to each other like that.
I would have been happier to see them do some kind of text on screen Chuck Lorre vanity card-style rather than cringe my way through their best efforts to dramatize it.
