Round Two: About a Boy

About a Boy: Season 1, Episode 2 “About Total Exuberance” (C-)

I had hoped that maybe I might like this second installment better than the first since this show is decently enjoyable and relatively harmless. It proved more irksome than anything else, however, and I’m not sure I’m up for the task of continuing to watch and review it. The main problem is that its two main characters are created as such polar opposites that you can’t possibly believe that they would ever be able to reach some common ground. Aside from being impossibly precocious, to the point that he can hack into Will’s wifi (maybe it’s not password-protected) and tunnel into his house, Marcus also prints pictures of him and his older friend that read “best friends forever” and has the big child help him color in his wheel of emotions. Will, by contrast, can’t be serious for a second, and to think that Marcus putting on a puppy face or Fiona yelling at him would motivate him to do anything nice just doesn’t track. Bringing Marcus to a wild party for adults only and then abandoning him for its entirety so that he could pick up chicks sadly made more sense considering the already bankrupt logic of this show. If Will was a bit less arrogant and obnoxious and Marcus was more muted, this show might work better. The same goes for Minnie Driver’s Fiona, who sometimes seems like the perfect foil for Will and other times seems like a completely hapless fabrication who couldn’t possibly be a real person.