MAYBE they don’t pay a lot on “The View,” because the co-hosts all seem to be taking second jobs.
Last week Joy Behar debuted in her own talk-news show, “The Joy Behar Show,” and tonight it’s Sherri Shepherd, starring in her own Lifetime sitcom, called, yes, “Sherri.”
Based very loosely on her own life, Sherri plays a newly single mom/vengeful ex who works fulltime as a paralegal, and part-time as an entertainer, whenever she can get a gig on real-life shows, like “Ugly Betty” and “30 Rock” (a show Shepherd has appeared on in real life).
While “Sherri,” like the actual Sherri, isn’t the smartest new show of the season, or the funniest, it nonetheless can often be very funny. Too bad it starts out in the first scene with some unfunny, not to mention unnecessary racial, stuff. For example, Sherri is sitting with her two best pals at work (Elizabeth Regan and Tammy Townsend), talking about how her husband cheated on her and broke her heart. “Screw me once, shame on you. Screw me with a white girl, and we done,” she exclaims.
Suppose a white woman on TV said, “Screw me with a black girl, and we done.” Right off, that never would happen, because it would be considered a horrible racist thing, and no TV show would ever permit it. It’s time to give that old fashioned, played-to-death dialogue a real rest.
But once you get past those obligatory racial jokes, the show really begins to fly, especially when all three women and their uptight boss go out to a club so that Sherri can get back into the swing of things. She tries and ends up picking up her first man. Well, sort of a man, at any rate. This is when Shepherd really shines, and we get to see her comic timing, which is perfect.
There’s also another terrific scene in which Sherri finds out from the soon-to-be-ex (Malcolm Jamal-Warner — one of my all-time favorites), that the 20-year-old he’s been sleeping with is pregnant! Sherri and her pals go to confront the woman at her job — Quizno’s — where she works as a sandwich order-taker. Anger turns to hunger, and Sherri can’t help but to order a big sandwich from the pregnant rival.
John Avery plays Sherri’s retired pop who is there to help her raise her son (Brandon Khalil), and he is a pitch perfect dad and granddad who is sarcastic and funny.
Shepherd is the star, and she does a good job of, er, Shepherding the show and making her character very likeable and accessable. I only wish the women characters were deliberately funny, instead of being accidentally funny from being stupid. See, in real life, women actually say really funny things to each other because we mean to, not because we’re too dumb to know that we’re being funny.