Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Maggie’ On Hulu, About A Psychic Who Sees Her Romantic Future And Vows To Live In The Moment

Maggie, the new comedy debuting on Hulu, doesn’t feel like a streaming show, and for good reason: It was developed for and picked up by ABC for 2021-22, and shunted to Hulu six months ago, not long after one of the alphabet net’s other new comedies, Abbott Elementary, hit it big with critics and audiences. The fact that a) it was passed to Hulu, and b) took six more months to premiere, with little fanfare, doesn’t bode well for the show. But maybe it’s actually good…?

MAGGIE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A party in someone’s backyard. We see a sign saying “Psychic Readings by Maggie.”

The Gist: Maggie (Rebecca Rittenhouse) is a psychic who truly has “the gift”; if she touches someone or is even standing next to someone, she can get a vision of what their future is like. After accidentally revealing that one friend at that party is cheating with the other friend’s fiance, she meets a guest named Ben (David Del Rio). They seem to have chemistry but Maggie isn’t interested; she’s had such bad luck with dating that she doesn’t want to open herself up to possibilities.

Then he sits down for a reading, and she notices the domestic bliss of a girlfriend, then a wife and child. In one of the visions, she sees her own face and is shocked. Her mentor, Angel (Ray Ford), thinks this is a rare sign that she should follow. She lives with her parents Maria (Kerri Kenney-Silver) and Jack (Chris Elliott) in a massive duplex; Maria wants to know if she’s dating anyone and how to buy a single acai berry with her iPad.

Trying to live in the moment, she goes to a bar with her best friend Louise (Nichole Sakura), who is on a blind date, and runs into Ben, who is there with his sister Amy (Angelique Cabral) and her husband Dave (Leonardo Nam). Throwing caution to the wind, she has shots with them and ends up sleeping with Ben. But when she touches him again, she sees another vision of his wedding… and her face isn’t under the bride’s veil. Since she figures there’s no future in this relationship, she decides to end it there.

Six weeks later, her parents have found new renter for the downstairs apartment in their duplex. Jessie (Chloe Bridges) is an improvement over the bee lover that used to live there… until Maggie sees Ben is moving in with her. They’ve been on-again, off-again, with his connection with Maggie being during one of the off times. Now what is Maggie going to do, now that this guy that she had a real connection with, but ended it due to her “gift”, is now living with his girlfriend downstairs?

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Maggie has the feeling of a hangout show along the lines of Happy Endings or How I Met Your Mother. In fact, Hulu already has a show like this: How I Met Your Father.

Our Take: When we watched the first episode of Maggie, we got the overwhelming feeling that the show felt like a network single-cam pilot instead of something that would be on streaming. Sure enough — and we likely forgot about this — ABC had picked Maggie up for the 2021-22 season, but then shunted it to its sister service Hulu when it couldn’t find an opening for it (i.e. Abbott Elementary became a massive hit).

After watching the first episode, we understood why ABC held off, especially given the shows that they ended up airing ahead of it. Maggie, where Justin Adler and Maggie Mull serve as the showrunners, suffers from the age-old problem of network single-cams: Without an audience to give feedback, the jokes are more quippy asides than things that are borne out of character. Some of them hit, but most miss. In fact, almost the entire first episode felt like a lame attempt at replicating the HIMYM formula, save any memorable characters.

And, yes, it is the HIMYM formula: Star-crossed lovers, a major will-they-won’t-they plotline, super-attractive people lamenting how crappy their dating lives are, and a group of friends that can bounce one-liners off each other. But since the friend group is so generic — and this group includes proven comedy-ensemble player Carbal (Life In Pieces) — it’s tough for Adler and Mull to squeeze funny lines out of them.

Contrast that with Elliott and Kenny-Silver, who play Maggie’s parents. In the span of the one scene they’re in together, we see that Maria is a bit out of touch with everything that was cool on the internet five years ago, and Jack’s whole character is summed up in the line he says to Maggie: “Unless you’re dead or out of money, I don’t care.” Even Louise gives glimpses into her character with lines about how she once walked in on Jack going to the bathroom or how she counted on a date with a man who already had a boyfriend.

Maggie and Ben, on the other hand, are mostly blank slates, and that’s a problem. The show does have some warmth to it, and the presence of Carbal, Sakura, Elliott and Kenney-Silver tells us that the show can improve as its first season goes along. But at some point, Maggie and Ben need to acquire some sort of personality to make the show work.

Sex and Skin: Like we said, Maggie and Ben sleep together, but we just see them in bed together afterwards, eating takeout Chinese from the container, just like in Maggie’s vision of Ben.

Parting Shot: When Angel reads Maggie, he gasps as he sees something. She asks what it is, and he says “Time’s up,” then says, “It’s gonna be good.”

Sleeper Star: We will always give this to Chris Elliott, no matter how much or how little dialogue he gets.

Most Pilot-y Line: About Louise’s date, Maggie says, “His name is Glenn with two “n’s”; that’s proof he doesn’t know when to finish.” As in “in bed.” That line makes little sense and likely would have been changed had the show been in front of a studio audience.

Our Call: SKIP IT. While we want to like Maggie more, given Rittenhouse’s charm and the fun cast, the show is just too much of a quip factory for us to get a read on Maggie and most of the other characters.

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.