First the good news. “I’m With Her” is a romantic comedy–when is the last time you saw one of those on TV?–about a high-school English teacher (David Sutcliffe) who begins dating a movie star (Teri Polo). Bookish Patrick Owen meets glamorous Alex Young in typical sitcom fashion: her dog bites his butt at a coffee shop. But one of the charms of “I’m With Her” is that once you get past the “Notting Hill” setup, the show is more interested in character and story than it is in cracking jokes. Perhaps that’s because “I’m With Her” was created by Chris Henchy, a “Spin City” writer who happens to be married to Brooke Shields. Henchy clearly knows what it’s like to be a nobody on the red carpet and how acute performance anxiety can get when you’re about to sleep with someone who dates Hollywood hunks.
As delightful as “I’m With Her” is, you do worry that it will run out of steam. How many fish-out-of-water situations can the characters endure? But for the moment, “I’m With Her” feels as fresh as a first kiss. Polo and Sutcliffe are the rare sitcom actors who understand the value of understatement. They make Alex and Patrick just grounded and self-effacing enough: you believe that these two different people could really be together. Besides, any show with the guts to quote Balzac and Patrick Swayze in the same joke deserves all the love it can get.
And now for something completely different. Anyone who enjoys the sweet smartness of “I’m With Her” will loathe “Coupling.” (Though, to be fair, you don’t have to love “I’m With Her” to hate “Coupling.”) “Coupling” makes jokes starring the following words: penis, nipples, shaved, porn and vulva. And that’s just in the first two episodes. You’ll hear a lot about how “Coupling” is the PG-13 version of “Friends,” since it also focuses on six singles who do little besides talk about their love lives. The problem is that the folks on “Coupling” are so fake and unpleasant that no one will bother comparing them to anybody.
As fans of BBC America surely know, “Coupling” is NBC’s version of a successful British comedy, and the only thing more pitiful than spoiling the Brits’ fun is that the American version is virtually a word-for-word copy of the original. Is naughty talk somehow funnier with an English accent? Did the edits NBC made to squeeze in commercials unravel the show’s fabric? Whatever the answer, this “Coupling” gives sex, comedy and television a bad name. Somewhere Benny Hill is spinning in his grave.
