There’s a reason that CBS’ new sit-not-much-com “2 Broke G
irls” is worth a two-star rating: Its two stars, Kat Dennings and Beth Behrs, who make this show bearable.
With different casting, this show would be as flat as the pancakes they serve up in the Brooklyn diner where they work.
Dennings and Behrs play poor girls struggling along as waitresses — in the only diner in Brooklyn that has wood paneling and looks like it’s straight out of the Catskills.
They also have a horse in their Brooklyn backyard. Could the show’s creators have bothered to even read the housing code for the city of NY?
Anyway, Behr’s Caroline is the broke daughter of a Bernie Madoff type, while Dennings’ Max has always been broke. Together, these two funny women try to make the most of material that’s as stale as the bagels they serve.
Despite being from different worlds, Max and Caroline connect in the chaos of the diner, become roommates and try to start a business together.
The secondary caricatures (as opposed to characters) merely exist to spout unfunny cliches in horribly stereotyped, ethnic ways, and are only worth mentioning through their offensively sexist and repulsive dialogue:
Oleg, the Russian cook: “I thought your tight ass wasn’t coming in tonight, and my heart broke in half.”
African-American cashier: You might as well be a cheerleader waking up drunk in the locker room of Duke University. You got screwed!”
Oh, and the Asian diner owner is named Brice Lee. I swear.
Everyone speaks in or is a cliche. Every line is a one-liner and is accompanied by an old-fashioned, offensively loud laugh track. But if the canned laughs weren’t there, you might never know when to guffaw.