Stream It Or Skip It: ‘B Positive’ On CBS, A Chuck Lorre Comedy Where An Uptight Man Cohabitates With His Kidney Donor

Even during a pandemic, you can count on CBS having presenting at least one new Chuck Lorre sitcom every fall. This year, the new sitcom from the Lorre Funny Factory is B Positive, which puts together Thomas Middleditch and Annaleigh Ashford under very unusual circumstances: She offers to give him a kidney, despite not seeing each other since high school.

B POSITIVE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A man anxiously waits in a doctor’s office. When the nurse brings in a file, he sneaks a look. The doctor walks in and says, “That’s not your file.”

The Gist: Drew Dunbar (Thomas Middleditch) just learned that he’s in renal failure and will need a kidney transplant. This is distressing to Drew, not just because of the health issues, but that he doesn’t have any friends or family who would like him enough to give him a kidney. While he doesn’t reveal anything to his ex-wife Julia (Sara Rue) or his 12-year-old daughter Maddie (Izzy G), he apologizes to Julia and tells Maddie he loves her, neither of which is much like him.

At a wedding of a high school friend, he runs into Gina (Annaleigh Ashford), one of the bridesmaids. She was a mess in high school and isn’t much better now; she’s drunk and flying high on a pink pill she later realizes was Xanax. Because she works as a shuttle driver for an assisted living facility, she can sense death, and she tells Drew he’s giving off a “deathy” vibe. When he tells her that he’ll need a new kidney, she volunteers one of hers.

He initially dismisses it, but finds her on her shuttle the next day to thank her. She doesn’t remember, of course — when she gets drunk/high, she becomes “Becca” — but she still offers it after being reminded. She gets tested to see if she’s a match — with the support of her partner in partying, Leanne (Kether Donohue) — and when she finds out she is, she’s told not to drink, smoke or do drugs for 3 months.

Drew somehow has faith in her promise to stay clean, but that faith is shattered the very next day when he goes by her apartment and sees her passed out with a strange man there. He yells at her that she’ll die before he does, but when he realizes that she’s his only hope to get a kidney — the transplant registry has a 10 year wait — he attempts an apology, even hopping on the hood of her van to get her attention.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Like any Chuck Lorre sitcom, two people are thrown together and have to combine their worlds. It’s pretty much his signature, but this is the first sitcom we can think of where someone lives with his kidney donor.

Our Take: B Positive has the hallmarks of just about every Lorre sitcom: There’s a fantastic cast, and a thin premise. He always has a steady hand at the helm of one of his shows — here, it’s Mom vet Marco Pennette — and his writing teams always end up tailoring the shows to the actors’ various skill sets. But the first few episodes of a Lorre sitcom usually start out pretty rough, and B Positive is rougher than most.

The problem here is not just the idea that these two polar opposites are going to somehow forge a friendship due to Gina’s out-of-nowhere declaration that she’ll give Drew a kidney. It’s also that Ashford, whom we absolutely adore in just about anything we’ve seen her in (Masters of Sex, Unbelievable, etc.) overdoes it with the ditzy-at-times Gina.

Ashford is trying to go the route Allison Janney went in the first seasons of Mom: lots of physical comedy and over-the-top line readings. Janney made it work, and got an Emmy for her efforts. Ashford looks like she’s trying too hard to fill in the gaps with silliness. She’s played so many sharp characters over the years that it’s a bit disheartening to know that if B Positive goes the way of other Lorre sitcoms on CBS, she’ll be playing a dippy party girl for the next number of years.

Middleditch is basically playing an amped-up version of his Silicon Valley character Richard Hendricks, and that’s fine; if anyone can play uptight, anxious and closed-off it’s Middleditch. Like with Ashford, we’re hoping that the writers will find ways to soften and deepen Middleditch’s character as they work with him longer. But Drew’s brittleness somehow plays better to us than Gina’s dizziness.

The second episode establishes the cohabitating relationship that will likely carry the first season, wherever it may go — what happens after Drew gets Gina’s kidney, for instance? It also introduces us two two different sets of additional characters. We have Drew’s dialysis buddies Eli (Terrence Terrell), Samantha (Briga Heelan) and Jerry (David Anthony Higgins) and bubbly nurse Gideon (Darryl Stephens); there’s also Norma (Linda Lavin) and Mr. Knudsen (Bernie Kopell), who live at the assisted living home where Gina works.

All of them are welcome additions, but we’re not sure if they’ll add to the story or make it more confusing. But Lorre and Pennette know how to change and improve shows midstream, so the addition of these recurring characters tells us they’re already on to figuring out how to move the show beyond its shaky premise.

Sex and Skin: Except for the implication that “Becca” slept with a dude that Gina doesn’t remember the next morning, there’s nothing.

Parting Shot: After apologizing to Gina, she says she’ll still help him. They hug and the shuttle rolls away from its most recent stop.

Sleeper Star: We’re happy to see Heelan, Donohue and Higgins as regulars, but are overjoyed to see Lavin and Kopell get recurring roles. If B Positive goes the way of most Lorre shows, it’ll be good to see these two TV legends on our screens for the next few years. It’s especially good in the case of Lavin, who has been a standout on mostly crummy sitcoms of late (remember 9JKL?).

Most Pilot-y Line: As we asked above, we’re still not sure how long this can go before, you know, Drew gets Gina’s kidney. Then where does the show go? Or does Drew stay in dialysis indefinitely? If that’s the case, that’s pretty damned bleak, even for Lorre.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We’re recommending B Positive mostly on the strength of the cast and the ability of Lorre and his showrunners to make the adjustments they need to find the show’s sweet spot — remember, Lorre fundamentally changed Mom and The Big Bang Theory years into their runs and made them bigger hits, and weathered Charlie Sheen’s meltdown, so he’s got experience. But this is one of the shakiest premises we’ve seen yet in a Lorre sitcom, and we’re not even sure he can sustain this one for even two years, much less 6 or 10.

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, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream B Positive On CBS.com