Like Perfect Harmony, Sunnyside has its heart generally in the right place as one of several new shows celebrating the importance of the immigrant experience to the American tapestry.Īnd like Perfect Harmony, the pilot reduces most of the characters to single-joke outlines and offers limited shape for an ongoing series. The bigger story has nowhere to go after the pilot, Arthur’s story has only backsliding and other than a single uninteresting love triangle, none of the other characters provides anything worth investing in. That leaves Manji as a character with one joke - he was raised by missionaries and only knows judgmental titles for American movies like “Don’t Get AIDS” instead of Philadelphia - and Hill doesn’t even get that much. Here, a growth curve that should have been deliberate and organic is rushed and weakly justified by the text.Ĭamp does her bubbly best and gets the bulk of the first episode’s secondary story, complemented by by Segers’ deep-voiced innocence. He’s been perfectly playing punctured pomposity for much of his career and he’s great at giving characters plausible redemption. You might find yourself feeling some affection for Arthur, but that’s entirely because this is a perfect part for Whitford, in theory. “We like the basic shape of this, but let’s rethink the structure so that things that happen in the pilot will actually mean something to a viewer and viewers will be able to figure out what the ongoing series is.” After the pilot, I’m at a loss and my investment is limited. I don’t understand how this wasn’t a conversation that came up right at the beginning of the development process. Pilot director Jason Winer ( Modern Family) is an Emmy-nominated master of the single-camera comedy form, but there’s nothing he can do to reduce the choppiness of an episode in which each act break marks the end of what could or should have been a full episode - except those full episodes would have let characters develop and allowed for some sort of cumulative effect to build. Instead, what probably would have been a 100-minute feature film becomes a confusingly gutted 21-minute pilot in which every plot machination is unmotivated, every character shift illogical and every attempted emotional moment unearned. That seems like a fairly reasonable template for the first season of a TV show, right? A little Glee, a little Pitch Perfect and a little Mr. And maybe by the time the choir competes at regionals, this discordant group of outsiders will, as a unit, finally be in… perfect harmony. Inspired by their ineptitude and, more so, by the desire to topple the choir from a rival mega-church (overseen by John Carroll Lynch with a bad hairpiece), Arthur is lured to assist the choir, which features a bubbly local waitress (Anna Camp), her impressively dumb ex-husband (Will Greenberg), a talented bass (Geno Segers) with a crush on the waitress, the church’s well-meaning reverend (Rizwan Manji) and the woman who gets offended when Arthur says rude stuff (Tymberlee Hill).įrom here, you can guess the drill. Drunk and popping pills, Arthur gets a sign from on high when he overhears a rehearsal by a small-town church’s choir. Though they might get better eventually, and the basic elements are probably there, Perfect Harmony and Sunnyside are two of the more confusing and disappointing broadcast pilots of the fall.Ĭreated by Lesley Wake Webster, Perfect Harmony is the story of Arthur Cochran (Bradley Whitford), formerly the chair of Princeton’s music department, now marooned in rural Kentucky and contemplating suicide after the death of his wife.
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