The Joyously Uncomplicated World of Reba McEntire’s ‘Happy’s Place’
If streamers are increasingly looking for shows with wide appeal — and they are — it stands to reason that TV networks’ best hope for success is making shows for audiences that aren’t just broad, but whose sensibilities are closer to hyper-normie. The few sitcoms that are even still being made to be broadcast over the air can’t be genre-straddling tone poems like The Bear: premise-wise, less is more. Happy’s Place fits the brief.
The show — which premieres on NBC today — should get extra credit for fitting nearly all its action on a single set: the titular Tennessee tavern. Happy, for whom said tavern was named, died just before the events of the series pilot, leaving the business to his daughter Bobbie (Reba McEntire), who’s already been running the place for many years. But her hopes for seamless continuity in the tavern’s management are scuttled when Happy’s lawyer informs Bobbie that she only inherited half of the controlling interest in the business; the other half went to Isabella (Belissa Escobedo), a daughter Bobbie never knew Happy had, who never knew Happy and who has spent the cold open pleasantly chatting with Bobbie at the bar, entirely oblivious about their connection. How on earth will Bobbie and Isabella negotiate their relationship as business partners and as sisters?
Happy’s Place, set in the South and probably primarily intended for country music fans, is slightly annoying in the ways you might therefore predict. Isabella is a Zoomer, so she’s automatically slotted as the cast’s dismissible know-it-all. When, unsolicited, she offers her assessments of the Happy’s staff, informed by her college psychology courses, Bobbie suggests that she run the tavern’s HR. In other words, the immediate impression Isabella makes is scolding busybody. When she asks laconic chef Emmett (Rex Linn, McEntire’s real-life romantic partner) for advice about weathering Bobbie’s hostility, he tells her to stop saying she’s “entitled” to things, because it’s a “whiny” word — never mind that, legally, there are things she’s entitled to. Steve (Pablo Castelblanco), the tavern’s accountant, has either germophobia or possibly, as Isabella believes, OCD. If it ends up being the latter, writers should probably stop making punchlines of his complaints about strangers standing too close and breathing on him.
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Isabella has concerns about Bobbie having bartender Takoda (Tokala Black Elk) fix a broken beer tap when that’s not actually in his job description and he doesn’t get paid what a dedicated repair person would; I’d be interested to know how many of these kinds of fights Bobbie ends up losing, or if her fudging of labor laws continues to be presented as a cute quirk since she’s played by beloved American treasure Reba McEntire.
But, despite elements that lean corny, Happy’s Place has a lot to recommend it. Though Bobbie spends most of the first two episodes trying, directly and indirectly, to get Isabella out of her life, she pretty quickly comes around. One of the most effective scenes of the two episodes provided to critics comes when Bobbie apologizes to Isabella for treating her as a person who’s been forced on her, not a sister who’s been given to her, but does so at a moment when her intellect has progressed ahead of her emotions, so all the sweet things she’s saying come out as though she’s furious at Isabella.
As one would expect, McEntire has good comic chemistry with Linn, and stellar comic chemistry with Melissa Peterman, who plays bartender Gabby here, but previously starred opposite McEntire for six seasons on Reba. Peterman and McEntire are so comfortable together that McEntire’s scenes with Escobedo can’t really compete. If future episodes rotated Isabella out to plot lines with the other characters and let Gabby and Bobbie chop it up a little more while Escobedo gets comfortable with a multi-cam setup, it might not be the worst thing.
This week also sees the premiere of another multicam network sitcom: Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage, coming to CBS Thursday. Marriage follows the titular couple (Montana Jordan and Emily Osment) as they raise their baby while living with her parents. It’s a spin-off of Young Sheldon, set before the events of The Big Bang Theory, not to be confused with the still-unnamed Big Bang Theory spin-off coming to Max, and if you lost the thread 30 words ago and now just want to take a nap, you’re not alone.
On top of building out the ever-expanding Sheldon Cooper Universe, Marriage has to try to make viewers care about the characters in said Universe who aren’t science geniuses — quite the opposite, in Georgie’s case. Since the show presents itself as a tender but irreverent look at a young and loving family, it’s jarring when one of the leads experiences a very serious health crisis in the second episode.
Maybe the writers on this multicam spin-off of a single-cam coming-of-age story want to prove they can still bring poignancy in a format that has, historically, been the domain of lighter fare. But watching Marriage and Happy’s Place on consecutive nights will just make the former look more effortful. Unlike Georgie and Mandy, Bobbie and Isabella (and especially Gabby) just want to have a good time without straining for importance. Maybe you do too.
