Ken Jeong’s family doctor sitcom is dead on arrival.
At first glance, Dr. Ken sounds like a show tailor-made for Community and The Hangover star Ken Jeong. As an actual licensed physician and family man, the actor is basically playing a TV version of himself in his new ABC sitcom, debuting Friday night. Of course, real life doesn’t always translate well to TV, let alone multi-cam, and Dr. Ken has a serious case of the “unfunnier.” Which is a shame, because until now I hadn’t seen Jeong in anything I didn’t like him in.
Alas, in almost every respect, Dr. Ken is a failure. On the show, Jeong plays a general practitioner whose biggest concern in the pilot is whether or not his 16-year-old daughter will pass her driver’s test. And wouldn’t you know it, she does, which leads Dr. Ken to freak out about it in all the ways protective father stereotypes do.
We want to hear it.
I can’t really point to any one thing that’s bad about the pilot, because it’s all pretty terrible: the characters, the jokes, the storylines — they’re all incredibly obvious and insufferably conventional. When Ken’s not obsessively keeping tabs on his daughter, he’s trying to score “topless sessions” with his therapist wife (Suzy Nakamura), or telling his young son how lame his Katy Perry mime routine is. Meanwhile, Ken’s “eccentric” coworkers can all be summed up in one word: sassy (Tisha Campbell-Martin), ditzy (Kate Simses) and unhinged (Jonathan Slavin). Then there’s Ken’s sleazy administrator (Dave Foley), who makes racist remarks to his subordinates and gives them extra vacation days to make up for them.
Across the board, there is nothing to like about Dr. Ken except for Jeong himself, who you can tell is trying his best to make any of it work. Ultimately, though, you just want it all to end so the actor can move on to another, hopefully better, production.
My face while watching this pilot.
It’s hard not to think of Craig Robinson’s failed sitcom while watching Dr. Ken. Both Robinson and Jeong are funny guys who seem to make better side characters than they do leading men. That or they both picked bad first projects to star in. I’m inclined to think the latter, based on their previous work. Live studio audiences were never either of their fortes, so why they both chose to headline multi-camera sitcoms is a bit of a head-scratcher.
It also makes you wonder if Jeong’s family doctor show would have worked better as a single-camera series, à la The Mindy Project or Scrubs, because, as it is, Dr. Ken is terminal.
I really wanted to like Dr. Ken, because I really like Ken Jeong as a performer. Unfortunately, his new multi-camera sitcom on ABC is a grind, top to bottom. Between the eye-rolling “humor” and cookie-cutter characters, there is nothing funny or memorable about this show. The only lasting impression Dr. Ken’s premiere will make is getting Katy Perry’s “Roar” stuck in your head again.
Dr. Ken premieres Friday, October 2nd on ABC.
