Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Carol’s Second Act’ On CBS, Where Patricia Heaton Plays A 50 Year-Old Medical Intern

Patricia Heaton is one of a handful of actors who have been the stars of two long-running sitcoms. Nine years on Everybody Loves Raymond and nine on The Middle have shown how versatile of a comedic actress she can be. So seeing her back in a CBS multicamera sitcom, Carol’s Second Act, feels like Heaton is going back home in a lot of ways. But can Heaton make a not-so-good show better all on her own?

CAROL’S SECOND ACT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Three interns are standing at the nurse’s station in their hospital, waiting for their chief resident to come address them on their first day of work.

The Gist: When Carol Kinney (Patricia Heaton) comes out of the elevator, the interns think she’s the chief resident. But the confusion is quickly cleared up when she informs them that she’s an intern, too. An intern who looks like she could be their mother? The other three interns — the overconfident Daniel Kutcher (Jean-Luc Bilodeau), the undeconfident Caleb Sommers (Lucas Neff) and the right-in-the-middle Lexie Gilani (Sabrina Jalees) — can’t believe that this fiftysomething woman actually managed to get through medical school.

Carol gives the spiel: She was a high school science teacher, and after a divorce and her kids leaving the nest, she wanted to use the next phase in her life to pursue what she always wanted to do. “My husband left to find himself; now he’s sleeping on a futon in his sister’s basement and I’m a doctor, so life is good!” she says.

The hard-ass chief resident, Dr. Maya Jacobs (Ito Aghayere) warns the interns that it’ll be hard work and long hours and not everyone will make it. Carol rightly thinks that Dr. Jacobs is looking right at her when she says it. After their first rounds, where Carol ends up talking way too much, Dr. Jacobs tells her to collect stool samples while Dr. Kutcher gets to assist on a car accident patient. But while in the room with that patient, she actually talks to him and his wife and they reveal something that alerts Carol that something else may be wrong. Dr. Jacobs tells her to not interfere on someone who isn’t her patient, but she does anyway, and then has to help Dr. Kutcher tell the patient he has cancer.

In the meantime, Drs. Sommers and Gilani bond over the fact that they had to scrape to get to this point; Lexie feels enormous pressure to do well, and Caleb says “We’re the same.” That is, until department chair Dr. Stephen Frost (Kyle MacLachlan) comes in and says hi to Caleb, the son of a family friend. Caleb then tells the ticked-off Lexie that his dad had to pull strings to get him off the waiting list at medical school.

Our Take: Emily Halpern and Sarah Haskins (Booksmart, The Mayor) created Carol’s Second Act, and we want it to be good. We really, really do. We’re huge fans of Patty Heaton, and we appreciate the fact that this comedy is more about her character’s second phase, and finding a new and fulfilling career, and not about her being a spouse or a mother (though we do see Ashley Tisdale as her pharma-rep daughter Jenny).

But this pilot — sorry, this revised pilot — is just terrible, despite the presence of Heaton, MacLachlan and Neff. From the moment the young interns confuse Carol for their senior resident (which also makes no sense, since a resident is only a few years ahead of them, career-wise), to the part where the actual chief resident doesn’t trust Carol’s commitment to the hard work of being an intern, to the fact that all of the supporting characters are one-dimensional cliches, and you have a pilot full of tell, and not a lot of show.

Heaton gamely puts the pilot on her back, as you’d expect. She’s the only reason to keep watching and expect the show to get better. But even here, we see some seams showing. Because Heaton has to carry the comedic load, we see a Carol that’s too hyper and eager, and not until the cliched scene where she sees things that Dr. Kutcher doesn’t because she actually talks to the patient do we see what the potential of Carol to be. Her life experience, including how she dealt with her students, will constantly give her an advantage over the younger interns. But again, we are told that in the pilot instead of being shown how it’ll apply in her everyday work.

There’s some potential for romance between Carol and Dr. Frost, but we’re not sure that’ll save the show, even though we liked how Heaton and MacLachlan played off each other in the pilot’s final scene.

Sex and Skin: Besides Carol telling all her fellow interns (including Lexie) to stay away from Jenny, not much.

Parting Shot: After warning off her fellow interns from dating Jenny, they all say in unison, “We understand, Carol.” Then she tells Danny to put his napkin in his lap. So she’s going to be the group mother?

Sleeper Star: We didn’t mention Cedric Yarbrough, playing the tough and snarky nurse Dennis. Coming off Speechless, let’s hope Cedric gets more screen time than the couple of brief lines he had in the pilot.

Most Pilot-y Line: There’s a scene where Carol starts defending her actions to Dr. Jacobs before the chief resident can even get a word out. Then, after Carol’s monologue, Jacobs says “Are you done?” “No, I’m just getting started!” says Carol. Then Jacobs thanks her for helping with that patient, despite disobeying orders. That’s about as cliched a sitcom joke as it gets

Our Call: STREAM IT. How can we recommend streaming Carol’s Second Act when we just spent a few hundred words telling you how awful the pilot was? Two words: Patricia Heaton. She’s one of the few stars that can make a show better by sheer force of will. We hope that once the show settles into a groove, it figures out what to do with Carol and her fellow interns. But it might be a brutal stretch before that happens.

Your Call:

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.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Carol's Second Act On CBS.com