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The Single Girl: Getting just as free a ride, but deserving more, is Lea Thompson as the charming Caroline in the City (***, 9:30 ET/PT) in the hard-to-avoid hammock between Seinfeld and ER.
Caroline is a cartoonist whose creation is always mistaken for Cathy. You know the type, the lovelorn SWF seeking commitment. Thompson (Back to the Future) fits the bill with flare: chipper, perky, a little bit sheepish.
Did we forget cute?
The people in Caroline's life, all rendered vividly by master director James Burrows, are a fizzier bunch than The Single Guy's derivative co-stars. Only Andy Lauer as an eager-beaver employee at a greeting-card company seems too stock, pushing for laughs in one brief scene.
Caroline's on-and-off boyfriend/boss Del is a dreamboat played by Eric Lutes, best remembered as Frasier's gay station manager last season. But the real comic spark comes from Malcolm Gets as her new assistant, a dour starving artist who looks petrified by contact with any living being, including her cat.
Gets' line readings are always unexpected, always funny. He obviously also pines for Caroline. Who wouldn't?
There's a nifty scene in which Caroline and her saucy pal (Amy Pietz) toss fruit out the window hoping to bean a catch, admittedly "a somewhat misguided attempt to meet men." One guy swallows the bait, but jokes, "There was a woman on Seventh Avenue who just threw a pork chop at me."
Despite a few groaner punch lines and some tired shtick with an Italian maitre'd, Caroline goes down easy. Was it only a year ago that NBC tried to force-feed us Dabney Coleman and Madman of the People in the same time period?
There's nothing that insufferable in NBC's revamped Thursday. It's just too bad no one tried anything new.
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