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Thank God You're HerePutting improv on TV? Hardly.

By Dan Kois
Posted Thursday, April 19, 2007, at 12:33 PM ET
Thank God You're Here. Click image to expand

On NBC's new series Thank God You're Here, an adaptation of the Australian improv-TV hit of the same name, low-grade celebrity guests—Tom Arnold, say—are given outlandish costumes and props (a chef's hat, an apron, a toilet plunger), shoved onto flimsy-looking sets (a fancy restaurant), and forced to respond to wacky scenarios they know nothing about (Tom Arnold: angry chef!).

Unlike shows such as Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which improvisation is used as one tool among many to create scenes that are later honed in the editing room, Thank God You're Here presents itself as a pure improvisational contest. The show it most resembles is Whose Line Is It Anyway, which Drew Carey hosted on ABC from 1998 to 2004. But viewers who got a taste for improv from Whose Line should steer clear of Thank God You're Here. It's not just that the show (which just moved to Wednesday night) is less funny than Whose Line, which coasted for years on Wayne Brady's singing voice alone; it's that what passes for comedy on Thank God isn't really improv.

That's not to say that the celebrity guests are cheating or something. I don't doubt that none of them has seen a script. But the supporting performers in the show clearly have seen a script, or at least a list of setups, gags, and plot points to stick to. Which means Thank God You're Here isn't improv, not in any true sense. Its conceit requires its performers to ignore the immutable law of comedic improv, the one every aspiring improviser is taught on her first day of Improv 101: "Yes, and ... "

In a good improvisational scene—whether a short-form game like those played on Whose Line or the long-form performances seen every night on stages like Chicago's Improv Olympic or New York's Upright Citizens Brigade Theater (where I performed for several years)—the action is driven by one character accepting another's offer ("Yes … ") and then launching it in a new direction ("and … "). A partner of mine once started an improv scene by pretending to stir a pot of pasta on a stove; I joined her, assuming we were co-workers in a restaurant. But when she turned to me and lovingly said, "It's so special to me that you came over for dinner," I discarded my assumption—because sticking to my restaurant idea would only have created confusion onstage. Instead, I patted her on the back and replied, "I know, dude—you're like the kid sister I never had!"—accepting her offer (we're in her kitchen, she's making me dinner, she's in love with me) and adding information (I'm totally blind to her feelings).

My response wasn't particularly witty, but it laid the groundwork for a scene that quickly became very funny as she went to greater and greater lengths to convince my character of her devotion. Through agreement and elaboration, improvisational performers invent relationships, emotional stakes, and dramatic and funny scenes out of nothing but their own teamwork.

Contrast that principal precept of improv with Thank God You're Here, in which the celebrity guests are placed in scripted scenes and forced to vamp their way through. The series regulars—talented improv vets deemed so unimportant their names don't even appear on NBC's Web site for the show—do not improvise at all; instead, they ruthlessly proceed from hoary setup to hoary setup, instructed, it seems, to ignore the celebrity guest's responses. In one scene, Seinfeld's Wayne Knight plays a quack doctor narrating a slide show. When he identifies the handsome, smiling man in one slide as a successful user of his products, the host brushes his assertion aside in order to get to the preplanned gag: "This is actually a 'before' picture of him, taken before he took your longevity supplements, and we have him here right now." Enter, of course, a wizened old man in a stained T-shirt—the punch line the show's writers intended all along, Knight's responses be damned.

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Dan Kois has worked as a film executive and a literary agent. He writes and edits New York magazine's arts and culture blog, Vulture.
Still from Thank God You're Here copyright 2007 NBC Universal Inc. All rights reserved.
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