Stream It Or Skip It: ‘I Feel Bad’ On NBC, About A Mom Who’s Not Perfect And Is (Kinda) OK With It

Amy Poehler has had a good track record with the shows she produces, from Broad City to Difficult People to Making It. So I Feel Bad looks promising, especially because the perspective comes from an Indian-American writer, Aseem Batra. Read on to see if this is unique for network television or more of the same…

I FEEL BAD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: The opening shot of the pilot is a woman smiling and being massaged by a muscular guy, then reality strikes, and she wakes up with her husband’s beefy hand on her face. The voiceover says, “Here’s what every woman knows: we feel bad about something almost every day. Like sometimes, I cheat on my husband in my sleep.”

The Gist: Emet Kamala-Sweetzer (Sarayu Blue) has a busy life, to say the least: two school-aged kids, a baby, a husband she has to talk off the ledge every time he comes home from work, a career as an artistic director for a video game company, and two parents who live nearby and visit all the time, much to her chagrin.

She tries to handle it all, but she knows she’s not perfect. She wants time to herself, like those twenty minutes after the kids go to sleep that she can just be by herself with a glass of wine. She does things like create an Honors Student bumper sticker so she can get the express drop-off in the morning. But she loves her husband David (Paul Adelstein), her kids Louie (Rahm Braslaw) and Lily (Lily Rose Silver); she just wishes she didn’t have to be around them so much.

Her relationship to her parents is a little different. Her dad Sonny (Brian George) is fine, if a bit befuddled. Her mother Maya (Madhur Jaffrey), though, is another matter: She’s always critical, thinking Emet’s immaculate house is filthy and she’s too nice to her kids. Neither of her parents are the biggest fans of David, either. But she loves them and needs their support.

Emet also has support at work with her nerdy designers Chewey (James Buckley), Norman (Zach Cherry) and Griff (Johnny Pemberton), whom she asks to weigh in on her mothering decisions despite the fact that these guys are barely mature enough to take care of themselves.

Our Take: When I Feel Bad was announced as one of the NBC premieres for fall, it seemed like one of the shows that was the most promising. After all, Amy Poehler is an executive producer, and creator Aseem Batra, writing about a life that’s similar to her own, has a pedigree going back to being on the writing staff of Scrubs. The thought that we would see an Indian-American working mother admitting and showing that she wasn’t perfect seemed like great fodder for a modern-day comedy.

But after three episodes (two aired on 9/19, the third in its normal timeslot on 10/4), we’re ready to bail on this show. It’s not that we don’t like Blue and Adelstein. Heck, the entire cast delivers their lines with aplomb (though we’re not sure why George, whom we love, continues to get Indian dad roles). But the situations we see Emet in are just too broad and derivative of things we’ve seen in domestic sitcoms for time immemorial: Emet uses the neighbor’s house while housesitting to get away from her family; she lies to her son that he’s an honor student so she can use that counterfeit sticker; she tells her daughter she can join a dance crew then doesn’t know what to say when the kids do dances that are way inappropriate; Emet is scared that she’s starting to look like her mother.

There’s more than enough guilt-inducing parental judgement on the internet to mine truly modern parental stories, like hating playdates or giving kids too much screen time or the fear that busybody neighbors will call CPS on you if they see your preteen playing in the yard by themselves. It feels like the situations in I Feel Bad aren’t new, and aren’t approached in a new way, which undercuts Emet’s desire to have it all but knowledge that it’s not going to happen so might as well make the best of it.

And let’s not even get started on the critical mom or her stoned Greek chorus at work. I Feel Bad doesn’t need to be a workplace comedy, and Emet doesn’t need to have more pressure put on herself by her stereotypical mom. A friend of ours said that those characters feel like they come from network notes, and we have to agree. In fact, this entire series felt like it was made less funny by network interference.

Sex and Skin: Some snogging between Emet and David in the housesitting episode, but that’s it.

Parting Shot: David pats Maya’s butt, and Maya says, “Whats wrong with you, man?” And as David recoils at the thought of patting his mother-in-law’s bum, we hear Emet’s voiceover go “That’s not great.”

Sleeper Star: As we said, we love Brian George. He does great as Emet’s dad. We just wish he wasn’t also playing Raj’s dad on The Big Bang Theory at the same time.

Most Pilot-y Line: Even accidentally throwing your shoe at your kid — like your mom once did to you — isn’t cool.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Despite the talent involved, I Feel Bad isn’t at all funny. And it’s not daring either, which may be even worse.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Watch I Feel Bad on Hulu