After binging all ten seasons of the time travel comedy Friends - beepers, answering machines and the invention of email, oh my! - I was left with a six person-sized void to fill after Rachel got off the plane last week. Without doing a lot of research, I pivoted in tone from the tame innuendo of Friends to the unapologetically raunchy comedy I’m Sorry. While some of the storylines come across as vulgarity for vulgarity’s sake, the characters are likable and the dialogue is quick and sharp.
I’m Sorry is a comedy from Andrea Savage, who created and stars as a version of herself: comedy writer, wife and mom. Most of us will never know how close Andrea Savage is to her alter ego Andrea Warren but, personally, I don’t need to. I’ll take the dramatized version who sticks her foot in her mouth, curses like a sailor and pronounces the day her five year-old daughter uses sarcasm for the first time as the best day of her life.
Andrea, husband Mike (Tom Everett Scott) and daughter Amelia (Olive Petrucci) are the sun in the I’m Sorry universe. Andrea and Mike raise Amelia in the only way they know how: trial and error. They overcorrect when she expresses interest in The Little Mermaid and Amelia reacts later by scorning a stay at home mother. And after Andrea shows her The Sound of Music, Amelia is worried Hitler is hiding in her closet. Andrea’s solution? Give Amelia a stone leftover from the goddess party she hosted. After all, like the sorcerer’s stone in Harry Potter, it will protect her from all the scary things in the world. When Mike correctly points out that the sorcerer’s stone was used to help bring Voldemort back to life, not to protect Harry, Andrea quips, “F**k you, JK Rowling. Go back to the café. Write a couple new notes. I’m just kidding, I do love that goddamn book.”
Despite the fact that Andrea’s nuclear family is central to the show, I’m Sorry is far from a family sitcom. Andrea and her writing partner Kyle (Jason Mantzoukas) trade barbs with the best of them. They have known each other for years and are most often vehemently defend their opinions to each other like two siblings who refuse to admit defeat. Kathy Baker and Martin Mull pop up as Andrea’s divorced parents Sharon and Martin. And though I still have trouble accepting Baker as anything other than the hook hand from Boston Public, she is hilarious as a parent and confidant to Andrea. Sharon is up for anything so long as she arrives home in time to feed her husband, Leon. Leon’s impending demise and Martin waiting in the wings for Sharon provides one of the funniest long running throwaway storylines. Because Leon is perfectly healthy.
Andrea gets herself into a borderline high number of unbelievable and very awkward situations, but her hilarious attempts to extract herself from said situations more than make up for the stretch in reality. She's doing her best to overcome the immaturity that, let's face it, is often more fun than that adulting business. There's a little bit of Andrea in all of us. How can you not relate to a person who's first act after her family leaves the house for the weekend is to gleefully drop her pants...to do some household chores the way God intended: comfortably.
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