Diners are a not unfamiliar setting for sitcoms, and the highest-rated new comedy of the 2011-2012 season, the CBS hit 2 Broke Girls, uses one as its chief setting, and the occupational string that tethers a new, odd-couple pair of roommates.
Created by Michael Patrick King and Whitney Cummings, the series centers around Max Black (Kat Dennings), a sardonic, young blue-collar waitress in Brooklyn who finds herself an unlikely new pal in the form of Caroline Channing (Beth Behrs, above left), a disgraced socialite who finds her trust fund frozen when her father is arrested on massive fraud charges. After Caroline lies to get a job, Max takes her under her wing and, after dumping her cheating boyfriend, lets Caroline (and her horse… yes, seriously) move in with her. Together they cope with horny short order cook Oleg (Jonathan Kite), manager Han (Matthew Moy) and perpetually exasperated cashier Earl (Garrett Morris), while hatching a plot to save up $250,000 and start a boutique cupcake business.
The show’s pilot episode — co-written by King and Cummings, and directed by James Burrows — honestly doesn’t put its best foot forward, and is one of the season’s weaker episodes. 2 Broke Girls isn’t a single-camera series, but its rapid-fire repartee (which ramps up as the season wears on) seems like it might actually benefit from a visual re-imagining. As is, the show is fairly flatly shot and paced, and often riddled with slight mis-framings or other editorial hiccups. And the diner itself — in which Max frequently takes aim at hipsters, and Han tries to install karaoke to lure in more business — seems a strange and unconvincing hodge-podge of set design.
Thankfully, the series gets out of the diner a bit more as things wear on, and while each episode ends with a tag charting the girls’ progress toward their financial goal (i.e., the show’s big syndication pay-off), additional complications (including a visit to an underground dentist’s office in the fourth episode, “And the Rich People Problems”), bonding and opportunities (a new upstairs neighbor, Sophie, played by Jennifer Coolidge) flesh out the show in winning ways.
What 2 Broke Girls most has going for it, though, is its cast. There’s more than a pinch of Diablo Cody in the snarky dialogue, but Denning locates a rhythm and smart break points that make some of her patter come across as less contrived. Behrs is also lovely, and she and Denning develop a real rapport.
2 Broke Girls: The Complete First Season comes to DVD spread out over three dual-layer discs, and housed in a plastic Amaray case with a dual-sided tray, in turn stored in a sturdy, complementary cardboard slipcover. Under a static menu screen, the two dozen episodes are presented in matted widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track. The transfers are okay, though there is a bit of artifacting present in early episodes; problems seem to abate later on, on the set’s second and third discs. There’s also a tri-fold, full-color insert with cast photos and episode summaries. Bonus features consist of a half-dozen minutes of unaired and alternate scenes, as well as a 14-minute behind-the-scenes featurette that includes intercut interview chats with the show’s cast and creators. Commentaries or a few other bells and whistles would have been nice; it seems like CBS or home video distributor Warner Bros. was perhaps hedging their bet on this release. Now that 2 Broke Girls is a hit, and set to return, one would imagine that its second season release will come with a more robust slate of extras. To purchase the set via Amazon, click here. B (Show) C+ (Disc)