King of TV comedy Chuck Lorre may have another hit on his hands with the Monday night premiere of “Mom.”
Lorre, who has endured the likes of troublemakers Brett Butler and Charlie Sheen on “Grace Under Fire” and “Two and a Half Men” respectively, finally gets a chance to mine for laughs something he’s an authority on — people with substance abuse problems.
The mother-and-daughter recovering alcoholics on his new show are played by Allison Janney and Anna Faris, and they are probably a lot funnier than any drunks you may know personally.
When the jokes work, they’re hilarious. As Christy, a single mother of two barely scraping by waiting tables at a precious Napa Valley bistro where they serve such delicacies as pounded capon — “That’s a castrated chicken they beat with a hammer,” she tells a diner played by “Men”’s Jon Cryer — Faris looks back on a lifetime of getting high and feels pretty low. “All I have to look forward to is serving risotto to a bunch of food Nazis,” she wails.
As Bonnie, a bon vivant and compulsive flirt who thinks she’s taken care of all her problems because she’s kicked the booze and the pills and the coke, Janney doesn’t regret much because she rarely reflects. And she can’t believe her daughter blames her own addiction on her.
After a long estrangement, they meet in an AA meeting.
“My mother taught me how to beat a cavity search and still feel like a lady,” Faris tells her fellow 12-steppers.
“Aren’t you a little too old to be blaming your problems on your mother?” Bonnie asks.
The repartee between the leads is snappy and doesn’t cut too close to the bone. After all, this is a sitcom, not an episode of “Intervention.” Faris is winning as a woman who has made every wrong choice a person can make, including a going-nowhere affair with her boss (Nate Corddry). The always welcome Janney is a complete delight as the svelte narcissist who can’t resist throwing herself at completely inappropriate men. Equally needy and defensive, this mother-and-daughter duo is evenly matched.
Where “Mom” doesn’t work is in the kid department. Christy’s daughter, Violet (Sadie Calvano), is just another one of those shrewish teenage girls that we have seen too often on TV. Don’t any Hollywood producers get along with their daughters?
Still, Lorre knows how to hire talent and if Janney and Faris can do for “Mom” what Jim Parsons and Melissa McCarthy did for “The Big Bang Theory” and “Mike & Molly,” this show may turn out to be one of the big surprises of the fall season.