Steve Bennett reviews Amazon's new comedy pilots

At the weekend, Amazon Prime released three female-led comedy pilots. Here’s our verdict:

Sea Oak

This feels less like a sitcom and more like an indie movie, with its relaxed pace and bold idiosyncratic cinematography, giving even shopping trolleys abandoned in a car park a bleakly artistic feel.

Sea Oak is an underclass community, where mild-mannered 99-cent-store worker Bernie (Glenn Close) lives an uneventful life – except for the local hoodlums occasionally shooting up her borderline slum home for kicks. She tolerates her two unemployed, unmotivated nieces and is adored by her nephew, who has he strangest job as a human mannequin in an unlikely tourist attraction, a house beneath an overpass that hosts a number of historical tableaux. Though what tourist would ever come to this crap-hole?

It’s things like this which lend a weird, slightly sinister, David Lynch-like mood to the slow-paced proceedings as Bernie ekes out her quiet life in her declining years. For about 25 of the 35 minutes, it’s all underplayed surrealism – until then things change. Spoiler coming…

For right at the end Bernie turns into a zombie. But not, apparently, the sort that roams the streets looking for brains. Instead, she burrows herself out of her grave and goes right back to her favourite armchair. However, as one of the undead all her previous meekness has gone, and now every angry emotion she ever bottled up erupts in bitter invective.

It’s a fantastic split-level performance from Close, and the show looks magnificent. The comedy may be of the wryly weird variety, but this is the one of the three that most feels like it has legs, for it’s an intriguing scenario that director Hiro Mura and Man Booker-winning writer George Saunders have carefully set up here. What could possibly happen next.

Love You More

In contrast with their clear vision, Love You More isn’t quite sure what it wants to be.

It starts as a bawdy comedy as Bridget Everett’s character Karen Best pulls a man at the bar, setting up a sex scene of graphic raucousness, but little subtlety, as they are interrupted in flagrante… and Karen finds herself all out of morning after pills.

Then we crunch the gears, as for Karen’s day job she’s a carer at a house full of children with Down’s Syndrome, and suddenly its a sweet-natured comedy tugging at the heartstrings. Seems like Everett’s plundering all the tart-with-a-heart cliches here.

At work she gets touched inappropriately by one of the children - leading to her having to explain the term ‘motorboating’ in a formal environment… but it doesn’t ultimately upset the idea that there’s a purity and innocence in those she is caring for that the rest of us have lost.

And then crunch again as Karen goes hunting for a bra up to the considerable task of keeping her substantial breasts in check, and the show turns into a full-on, body-positive musical production very much in the breathless, proud, full-on spirit of Everett’s raunchy live cabaret shows. It’s very enjoyable but, like her old lingerie, doesn’t feel like a natural fit.

Directed by Bobcat Goldthwait – who’s building quite the reputation behind the camera since his Police Academy days – Love You More is one of those pilots that seems more like a run-through of a show trying to find its feet than a teaser for an upcoming must-see series.

The Climb

Despite a hugely charismatic central performance, The Climb struggles to engage because of a rather laboured script addressing obvious points too directly.

Diarra Kilpatrick stars as Nia, a millennial in a dead-end job who is obsessed with projecting a glamorous image on social media. However proprietary rights have presumably prevented anyone saying Facebook or Instagram… instead she’s always on a site called High-Wire, which instantly sounds bogus, and looks like the messiest of MySpace pages.

Anyway, her heroine is a Kim Kardashian type called Copper Lewinsky who has achieved fame and fortune through no obvious talent, just manipulation of the new media. That, too, is what Nia wants from life.

She believes wholeheartedly that social media will give her fulfilment – a concept usually related to the successful application of effort. But Nia will not apply herself at work, not commit to a relationship, since that gets in the way of her fantasy online life. No wonder her dreams are shot like rap videos.

Kilpatrick is brilliant in the deluded confidence she portrays, and Alysha Umphress wrings far more than expected out of the role of best friend Misty. But while a few scenes zing – Nia talking down an aggressive tramp in the convenience store, for instance –  the script is short on the personality and purpose of Broad City or Chewing Gum, which which it shares some ground.

And how much time you’d really want to spend in the narcissistic Nia’s presence is definitely open to debate.

• All three pilots are streaming on Amazon Prime now.

Review date: 21 Nov 2017
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