Best time ever… in the Tuesday night slot… on NBC… maybe.
Last night marked the series premiere of Best Time Ever with Neil Patrick Harris, a new variety series on NBC based on the UK’s Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway. As fans of How I Met Your Mother and various awards shows know, NPH is a force to be reckoned with, but Best Time Ever had the potential to be really good or really bad. Thankfully, the first episode wasn’t a complete travesty, but there were definitely awkward moments throughout — which is to be expected on a show that’s “so live, you guys, you don’t even realize!”
Not unlike Saturday Night Takeaway, Best Time Ever features a special guest announcer each week. For the premiere episode, Reese Witherspoon lent her bubbly voice to the proceedings, which also included appearances from Gloria Gaynor, Carson Daly and Carrot Top — plus, former Pussycat Doll and Harris’s lovely assistant Nicole Scherzinger. Suffice to say, these cameos spiced things up a bit, but for the most part it was up to Harris to carry the show, and carry it he did, albeit with obviously scripted banter and one-liners.
To its credit, some of the premiere’s segments were hits. In “Best Days of Your Lives,” for example, Harris revealed to a pair of audience members that he had been there for key moments in their lives — including their wedding! — and got it all on camera. Another highlight pitted Harris against Witherspoon in a skyscraper-climbing contest for a segment called “Neil Vs.” (How this wasn’t called “Challenge Accepted” instead is beyond me.) You can check out the video below:
However, other segments didn’t go so well. The obvious low point was a pre-taped video prank involving Harris and the judges from The Voice. Here, the TV host posed as an Austrian personality to “interview” the clearly miffed Adam Levine, Blake Shelton, Gwen Stefani and Pharrell Williams. As if their poor reception to the experience wasn’t enough, Harris followed up by singing “And I Am Telling You” in a blind audition on The Voice, in-character. The whole thing was just cringe-worthy and only amusing in an “I can’t believe this is still going” way.
Meanwhile, Best Time Ever’s “Singalong Live” surprised select viewers at home with an impromptu karaoke session. This went over about as well as you would expect, with jarring broadcast delays and clunky segues — although Harris did get in one good line about one of the contestants being “wasted.” (She totally was.) There was also the game show-esque “Get Lucky,” but that was more about the prize providers plugging their stuff than the game itself.
The episode did at least go out on a high note with the “End of the Show Show,” which included Harris mixing cocktails to music and performing awesome pogo stick stunts (not at the same time, but still).
Neil Patrick Harris is definitely in his element on NBC’s Best Time Ever, but the series premiere had more than its share of weird, dead-air quirks. Hopefully the show will start to learn what works and what doesn’t, and eventually find its groove.
