DeanNYC

Having watched the first six episodes of Rachel Sennott's obviously ironically titled "I Love LA," I have come to some conclusions.

Many people want to immediately compare this series with the Lena Dunham property "Girls," or Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson's "Broad City," clearly because this is a majority women cast.

But both of those previous shows were New York based and this show has not seemed to care at all about self-involved navel-gazing as on "Girls" or featured two women who worked together, almost as a team for the most part, as on "Broad City." Instead, I think the closest parallel to this show is the HBO favorite, "Entourage" with a tart twist.

Ms. Sennott plays Maia. She's looking to be a talent agent (right away, we're covering the same ground as "Entourage,"), and she is wrangling her client, her gal pal Tallulah (played with genius wildness and complexity by Odessa A'zion). Tallulah is back from NYC and is now ready to attack La La Land, head-on. Maia's boss at her boutique agency is Alyssa (Leighton Meester) and Maia is always in need of kissing up in order to make it up the corporate ladder.

True Whittaker is Alani, the Nepo Baby of the group, who is on the scene because her dad was famous. Josh Hutcherson is Dylan, Maia's guy, who is a schoolteacher when he isn't trying to stay in the loop with Maia, and last but not least is Jordan Firstman, playing Charlie, a freelance stylist to the stars, which essentially means he's usually out of work or scrambling to find some, even as he's on the prowl for some guys for extracurricular fun. There is a lot of "stock character" element happening with this roster; we've seen these types done previously on other series, and honestly, we've seen them done better.

To the good, there's a certain level of camaraderie happening, as these characters appear to be supporting each other, but a lot of the time that's all superficial lip service and the undercurrent of malice is sometimes so close to the surface it's almost right in every character's face. And every one of these players can switch from friend to enemy in one line of dialog, so you're never sure who is doing what to whom. That makes it more of a puzzle and a bit less predictable.

At least on "Entourage," you knew that there was a support system for the core characters of that series - those guys were always looking out for one another. Here, the problem is that any one of these characters could trick someone, backstab someone else, blackmail, threaten or screw up one of their lives, just so they could get a moment of glory, or a cool bit of swag. That makes them all challenging to watch with a sympathetic view.

HBO Max has already renewed "I Love LA" for a second season, so I'm willing to continue to watch it a little longer... but during the six episodes, I laughed fewer than five times. My wish would be for Maia to find some genuine support, somewhere, because even though this series might be accurate to its story, it's admittedly hard to love.

If you know much of anything about Television sitcoms of the 1960s, you know that the bulk of them had some kind of supernatural gimmick. Two of the more popular shows of this type: "Bewitched" and "I Dream of Jeannie" were about a beautiful immortal woman, helping out (or attempting to help) a mortal man with magic.

Here things are a little more down to earth. In "Dream Wife," a pilot that didn't make any network's schedule, Shirley Jones was the titular character (who was called "Liza" by everyone in the cast who used her name, but was listed as "Lisa" in the show's credits), who helped her hubby Paul (Donald May) rise through the ranks in his job to become a junior partner in his firm as this episode gets going.

The secret is that the character has the ability to hear thoughts (as the audience can hear them as well, with an echo-like voiceover when she's mind-reading) and through that, she could steer and guide her spouse to make the right choices and have success.

Liza (I'm going with how the name was pronounced), was a mom to young Tommy (Kelly Corcoran) who knows Mom has ESP through their private interactions, and they keep that info away from Dad because Liza's good friend Professor De Pew (John Abbott) suggests that telling him would create even more trouble when he discovers he hasn't accomplished any of his business achievements on his own!

The trouble with the pilot is in the interactions between the characters, which, even for a sitcom, don't feel real at all. Reactions to misunderstandings, handling antagonists and generally reacting to information by all of the characters just feels stilted and unreal within the program's own context. I think if those were cleaned up and made more believable, this might have found a network.

But there were two sitcoms that eventually were created that played on this very same theme. The first was "Nanny and the Professor" (which also borrowed liberally from "Mary Poppins") about a child caretaker played by Juliet Mills, who seemed to have several sorts of powers as she helped her little family along, and "The Girl With Something Extra" with Sally Field as another character with the ability to read minds, only she confessed her skills to her husband after they got married.

"Dream Wife" is a unique curio in TV lore, even as it was trying to copy the current tropes of the mid-1960s programming schedule, and Ms. Jones is the best, if not the only reason to consider giving it a look.

The World, The United States and New York City were very different places in 1966 than they are as you're reading this. And Prime Time TV back then was determined to try to distract its viewers with elements that were either nostalgic or completely unrealistic.

But sometimes, there were shows that at least bordered on the facts of the day, even as they played it for laughs. One of those was "Occasional Wife."

At the time, there was a belief that if a man couldn't find a woman to marry him by a certain age, there was something bothersome, untrustworthy, "wrong" about him. So, if a bachelor was trying to climb the corporate ladder in a company, they likely would be passed over by a married guy, especially one with a family.

Such was the case for executive Peter Christopher (Michael Callan) who worked for a Baby Food company (hence, the "family image" issue), as Peter was looking to get promoted by his persnickety boss, Mr. Brahms (Jack Collins). So, Peter did the only thing he thought to do, get his platonic woman friend Greta (Patricia Harty) who was already pretending to be married to "slow down" the male patrons of the cocktail bar she worked at, to be a stand in as his spouse!

Peter moved Greta into an apartment two flights above his own, and the charade began, as Greta was working to become a fashion designer at a local art school (which Peter paid for as recompense for her having to be Peter's "wife").

Scenarios involved Greta playing house for Peter, even as Peter's actual girlfriends were around and about, unexpected visits from his corporate bosses for dinners, and all of the machinations and manipulations that those things created, including the requisite racing up and down the NYC building's fire escape so Peter could escape getting fired.

Plus there were the disapproving glances from the neighbor in-between those floors (great character actor, Bryan O'Byrne) who wordlessly watched the traffic flying past his window.

The most notable thing about the series was that it was narrated by long time Dodgers play-by-play announcer, Vin Scully, in an uncredited role, where he would describe the action and even make commentary about the circumstances (Ron Howard would carry this concept to its zenith with his similar narration of the sitcom "Arrested Development," nearly 40 years later).

The show attempted to be a little bit spicy for its day, sometimes bordering on the same territory that "Three's Company," with its "two ladies and one gentleman in the same apartment" concept perfected just a decade later. But, in the end, despite the charm of Callan and Harty in their roles and the descriptions and accounts offered by Scully, "Occasional Wife" was out at home in just one at bat, er, season.