Plenty of movies that emerge from Will Ferrell & Adam McKay’s Gary Sanchez production banner (“Step Brothers,” “The Other Guys”), but “LA to Vegas” – its latest TV project, fails to achieve comedy liftoff.
Fabulous Fort Worth native Kim Matula, veteran of 906 episodes of “The Bold and the Beautiful, stars as a flight attendant applying for new routes because she does not care for the Los Angeles to Las Vegas roundtrip she currently services.
Sadly Matula can’t do much with the grade-D TV jokes she’s handed by series mastermind Lon Zimmet, veteran writer of network sitcom fare “Happy Endings,” “The Michael J. Fox Show” and “Superstore.”
Dylan McDermott, long-ago lead of David E. Kelley’s “The Practice,” plays the plane’s womanizing Captain Dave, sports Ron Burgundy’s “Anchorman” mustache and penchant for showing up for work drunk, but the only character who got a smile out of me was Peter Stormare’s vaguely Borat-like degenerate gambler Artem. But – surprise! – you can’t really transplant a hard-R personality like Borat onto a broadcast sitcom and keep the funny intact.
Not many newspaper critics appear to have bothered to review this project:
... a perfectly OK situation comedy … The trip is relatively free from turbulence, there are some things to see (and treats from the service cart if you’re lucky), and you are back on the ground almost before you know you’re flying. There is something to be said merely for not crashing. …
The San Francisco Chronicle says:
... doesn’t feel slapped together, but after you’ve seen three episodes, you may legitimately find yourself wondering if the show has legs — or wings, as it were — for the long haul. …
... The sitcom has all the makings of a witty, fun half-hour. Turns out it’s much more fun to watch people be on a plane than to be on one yourself. …
9 p.m. Tuesday. Fox.
