Review: Imaginary Mary “Pilot”

Yea, this thing’s a mess.

Spoilers Below

Typically, the reason one produces a live-action/animated series, it’s because there are just so many outlandish things you want to do with those live-action characters, that an animated take is actually a bit more practical in terms of believability. Let’s take the character of “Ted” for instance voiced and created by Seth MacFarlane. Ted wasn’t really a movie featuring an animated character for the sake of having an animated character. It’s because with Ted you can do shit like tear him apart and put him back together or have Giovanni Ribisi steal him, stuff him in a bag, and bring him home. If you were to try ripping a person apart and sewing him back together, the audience wouldn’t believe, no matter how hard Mark Wahlberg prays that that character could come back to life. But, because it’s an animated teddy bear that was wished to life, the audience CAN believe in a stuffed object becoming real again. Son of Zorn exasperated this concept by not only having an animated character in “Zorn”, but also having an animated world, a bunch of animated characters, and crazy shit like huge eagles getting their throats slashed on front lawns continues to prove my reasoning for having animated characters instead of live-action ones.

Enter, Imaginary Mary. A series that stars Jenna Elfman as “Alice” and her imaginary friend “Mary” voiced by Rachel Dratch. In this instance, Mary is your animated character and she shows up to kind of help Alice as a guide in traversing through the potential hurdles that comes with meeting your boyfriend’s three kids. Alice’s boyfriend is Stephen Schneider as “Ben”, and while how the couple got connected in the first place is totally not believable, he does a great job in trying the balancing act that is being a divorced father of three AND a boyfriend doing a song and dance for a woman that he might want to marry one day. The kids, Erica Tremblay as “Bunny”, Matreya Scarrwener as “Dora”, and Nicholas Coombe as “Andy” are fine if not the latter two being a tad too”run of the mill” in terms of character development with Dora being your “teenager vs the world” badge holder and “Andy” being your way too typically obsessed with social media prowess, a concept that is starting to wear thin in shelf life if it hasn’t already. The most genuine of the kids is Bunny, she’s cute and funny and is the little rascal who gets into a bit of trouble.

Jenna is excellent as “Alice”. Her comedic chops are just as razor-sharp as ever, and she does her best to bring the dreary drab dialogue to life. But, there is a noted difference when Jenna acts with not Rachel Dratch in the room and say when Mark Wahlberg and Seth MacFarlane do Ted. Yes, both actors are staring at some sort of an object and pretending that something’s there that isn’t, but because Seth uses better technology and is able to use his mannerisms to read out his own dialogue in the room with Mark, the give and take of both actors is there, and you can feel a camaraderie between both characters, animated or not. With “Mary”, we don’t get that because it has been noted that her lines are done in NYC while Jenna film in LA with a puppet NOT voiced by her, so the naturality just isn’t there.

Moreover, there’s no need for Mary to be an animated character…none whatsoever. Instead, the franchise lifts ALOT from the other live-action/animated hybrids. Clearly, Patrick Osborne asked the animators to make a girl “Ted” with the character design, and overall the character ironically doesn’t have a whole bunch of imagination to her. That, and the concept that a 2D drawing becomes an animated character imagined by only one person is actually a big part of the plot to Kirby Buckets. If anything, Kirby Buckets is actually more accurate in how the animated characters look when brought to life. Chances are if you are drawing a two-dimensional character, you are going to get an animated-to-life two-dimensional character when it comes off the page. So, not only does it not make sense that Mary is animated to begin with, given she gives the same types of familial-tropic advice that can be found on Friends and none of them were animated with the exception of Matthew Perry who was clearly touched up with After FX program to make sure he didn’t look like he was double over the legal drunk-driving limit, but it makes no sense that she’s a 3D CG character because that’s not how she was imagined by Alice at all judging by the pictures that she drew.

To be quite honest, this show actually has a lot of good heart and really doesn’t have a lot of need for Mary. On face value, a lot of this premise could work on its own and ABC could’ve gotten the full episode count they originally ordered with no problems at all. Instead, it gets delayed, shortened to nine episodes, for a character that is nonsensical and non-integral to the plot of the debut episode. Also, what, if anything, is on Patrick Osborne’s resume at the moment that points to a guy that can help produce an animated character for primetime animation? Patrick’s resume is with artsy-fartsy and children’s entertainment made for Disney, THIS is primetime animated television. This is the land of The Simpsons and Family Guy with a different ball game than live-action and a different set of rules and expectations.

ABC basically ordered itself another round of the problems it had with the primetime take on The Muppets, but at least the network was able to figure that out halfway through the show’s run and do enough to make it a decent show before it was canceled. ABC can’t do that here, so hopefully, the show’s live-action cast can keep this thing afloat, otherwise it’s gonna be a Saturday Night @ 9 pm show before you know it. I gotta tell ya, FOX should take a look at this then renew Son of Zorn, because as mixed of a show as that was, it looks like Casablanca compared to his pile.