Mr Mayor, review: Ted Danson returns to make American politics nice again
The dependable, half-hour American sitcom has had a good lockdown. People wanted something they could watch as a family that was funny, though not rambunctiously so, that was broadly uplifting rather than snide and that, crucially, ran for hundreds of episodes. Something had to fill all of those idle lockdown afternoons. And mornings and evenings.
Schitt’s Creek became a monster hit on the back of this need for comfort laughter, alongside Brooklyn Nine-Nine and The Good Place and Parks and Recreation. This presumably was why NBC made Mr Mayor (Sky Comedy), a Ted Danson vehicle that is about as risqué as cuddling the dog.
The plot is so straight down the line that it feels like an amalgam of several shows you’ve seen before but can’t quite put your finger on: Danson plays Neil Bremer, a retired advertising billionaire who stumbles into the job of mayor of Los Angeles, after the former mayor resigns in the face of the multiple horrors of 2020. Bremer sees his name on one of his empty billboards and determines it must be a sign (as well as being a sign – not a bad joke to kick off with).
It’s a classic fish-out-of-water set up and you can imagine precisely how it all plays out – Bremer is a good, simple man who is wholly unsuitable for office but styles it out, as if Ted Lasso had put on Martin Sheen’s jacket in The West Wing.
Bremer’s an rich old white man stumbling wide-eyed around a woke world, and writers Robert Carlock and Tina Fey (30 Rock, Kimmy Schmidt) quickly surround him with several sitcom staples – Jayden Kwapis is his hapless communications director (played by Bobby Moynihan, a dead ringer for our own Gordon Kennedy); Mikaela and Tommy are his two young strategists, tearing their hair out at Bremer’s every boomer faux pas; and Arpi Meskimen (Holly Hunter having a blast) is his right-on nemesis who he brings in as his deputy, on the inside-the-tent principle.
It turns out that Bremer only ran for mayor to try and prove to his daughter, Orly (Kyla Kenedy), that he wasn’t washed up. And so naturally she thinks he’s completely washed up, with the broad series arc being him proving to her that he isn’t.
Potential UK viewers should be aware that this is a specifically Angelino comedy – Bremer, for example, is so unreconstructed that one of his aides laughs that he still “thinks Santa Monica is part of Los Angeles” and there’s a running gag about the looming shadow of the 2028 Olympics. Bremer had no idea the Games would be within his purview when he came off the golf course and ran for Mayor. Much of this won’t mean a great deal to British comedy fans.
But Mr Mayor is also explicitly a post-pandemic comedy – the travails of 2020 are what drove the previous mayor to bail out and it will be part of Mayor Bremer’s job to bring some stability back to his parish. You could say that Mr Mayor the show is meant to perform a similar function: it’s neither risqué nor hugely original, but as lockdown hits have shown us, sometimes people want the pixelated equivalent of a warm blanket and a glass of milk.
