Television

Bravo series has freshness

By Steve Johnson
Chicago Tribune
03-23-2004

Significant Others, Bravo’s new, semi-improvised comedy, is probably not, as has been suggested, the future of funny on TV. But as another of television’s adventures in cable, one blessedly free of real people in compromising situations, this short-run series (8 p.m. Tuesdays, after Queer Eye for the Straight Guy) has an undeniable freshness. It’s a low-key look at three couples in marriage counseling and outside of it. Their lives don’t, as per convention, intersect, unless you count the way they all talk to the camera as if it were the therapist. There are the wound-up yuppie newlyweds, familiar as stereotype but made wondrously specific by Andrea Savage and Brian Palermo. Then you have the young couple (Herschel Bleefeld and Faith Salie) dealing with his slacker tendencies and her unplanned pregnancy, to terrific effect. Finally, there’s the long-married couple (Fred Goss and Jane Edith Wilson) who, despite having the least credibility problems, still manage to make their screen time pay off. Significant Others has a tone more in keeping with good British TV — dry, character-based humor, presented without laugh track or even specific punchlines — than anything American. Even if it seems too subtle for wide appeal, it would be nice for Bravo’s big-brother network, NBC, to give it a summertime run, just to see what would happen.