Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
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The news that NBC won’t be picking up Trial & Error for a third season is bad news for a lot of reasons. It cuts short one of TV’s most purely silly, funny comedies. An expert-level parody of modern true-crime fiction satirizing everything from podcasts like Serial and S-Town to docuseries like Making A Murderer and The Staircase, Trial & Error has nailed down one of the most popular genres in recent years. But you wouldn’t have needed to see a single piece of true-crime in order to appreciate the show, and that’s due to the inspired lunacy of the writing and the fall-out funny cast members, from Nicholas D’Agosto to John Lithgow to Kristin Chenoweth. The standout of the supporting cast, however, has been Sherri Shepherd as legal assistant Anne Flatch. Introduced to D’Agosto’s Josh in the first episode, Anne announces that she has face-blindness.
This kicks off one of Trial & Error‘s great running gags; this is a show with a gift for running gags. This one, that’s lasted a season and a half now, is that every week Anne has a newly announced medical ailment that is wildly, cartoonishly not based in reality.
It’s the stuff of a gifted comic performer to come back week in and week out and sell these ludicrous premises. Here’s the thing: Sherri Shepherd is an incredibly gifted comic performer.
It probably shouldn’t even feel like a surprise to say that now. But that’s what spending eight years as a co-host on The View will do for you. Shepherd joined the View team full-time after the departures of Star Jones and Rosie O’Donnell made such controversial headlines. Sherri and Whoopi Goldberg joined Barbara Walters, Joy Behar, and Elisabeth Hasselbeck, and together they were the longest-running co-host lineup on that daily chat-fest. Shepherd proved to be a game host, but her occasional detours into matters of parenthood and faith brought out a stubborn quasi-conservative streak in her. This is best remembered by the one time she wouldn’t say that she believed the Earth was round, a comment that arose from her statement that she didn’t believe in evolution.
So despite her experience in sitcoms previous to The View, it became really easy to write her off as a religious conservative without much of a sense of humor. But then came after 30 Rock, where Shepherd played the recurring role of Angie Jordan, Tracy’s wife and prominent reality TV star. Shepherd’s performance was instantly iconic, wringing laughs out of everything from ham to getting her hair did.
Given the surplus of Emmy Awards that 30 Rock took home over the course of its run, it’s rather insane that Shepherd was never nominated for playing Angie, not even after the season where Tracy kept trying to get her pregnant.
Sadly, the Emmys didn’t notice Trial & Error either, which now makes it two shows in a row where Sherri Shepherd has been legitimately brilliant and gotten no rewards for it. And now Trial & Error might go away entirely?? Why, it’s enough to make a normally mild-mannered woman go all dark and vulgar.
