Thank God You're Here!

Monday night i watched NBC's newest improv show called "Thank God You're Here". The premise is that every episode there are 4 "celebrities" that guest star per episode. Each celebrity is brought back stage and given a costume they have never seen before. Then they are brought back up front where host David Allen Greer directs them through a door which leads to set they've never seen. From there, they have to improvise their way through the whole scene with actors who have set lines and whose first line is always "Thank God you're here!". The scene goes on until judge Dave Foley (who got SO old looking) hits a buzzer.

After each guest does thier scene, the final scene is done with all 4 together. Finally a "winner" is chosen and receives some plastic award (The Summit awards are way cooler looking).

The episode I saw had Wayne Night (better known as Newman from Seinfeld), Bryan Cranston (the dad from Malcolm in the Middle), Joel McHale (some guy I don't know) and Jennifer Coolidge (Stiffler's mom from American Pie).

I'm not a professional improv player but after doing it for 4 years I could tell some of it, although funny, was pretty bad improv. For example, Wayne night was dressed in a white medical jacket and was plummeted into a scene where he had to promote some sort of pills. When asked certain questions, instead of accepting everything he was given, he was blocking pretty badly ("Actually, I'm not a doctor at all, and those aren't vitamins, their supplements to vitamins"). Although he got some laughs, I felt that it got tiring after a while.

Also, after 1 episode, I feel like i had enough. The rest of the episode wasn't too bad, neither was the 2nd episode they aired afterwards, but I dont' know how much of that I could really take. It was funny, but the way it's set up, it's as if the actors are always leading the scene and just allowing the celebrity guests to "insert joke here", and after a while it gets boring. The only person I saw to somewhat break from that was Bryan Cranston, who immediately got into character and was trying to push his way through the scene which I think truly made him deserve winning the episode.