TVSquad

(S01E02) For those of you who were trying to figure out how eight relative strangers, thrown together in a kind of a convoluted fashion, was going to constitute a sitcom, this episode shows you what the formula is going to be.

And what is that formula? Three parallel storylines that are not designed to intersect for some time in the future. You've got sappy Ethan's brewing friendship with the cynical Kat and Richie's accident-prone flirtation with Kat's twin Lina (how convenient is it that Kat and Lina are twins? That ensures that two of the pairs of strangers will stay connected); you have Nicole and Duncan's affair; and you have Kyle and Holly, who are still rebuilding their friendship after he came out of the closet at their prom ten years ago.

The writers of The Class still have some problems getting control of all these stories, but now that the relationships are more concrete, the humor that comes out of them is much funnier.

Even though the Ethan-Kat-Lina-Richie storyline, which takes place in the hospital after Ethan's party and after Richie accidentally runs over Lina after they have coffee, has the best jokes, it's not the best story, at least not so far. More on that in a bit.

But you can definitely see that Kat and Richie are going to be the breakout characters in this show. Even though her cynicism can be over-the-top, the lines written for her are usually pretty funny. For instance, when Richie tells her he didn't see her sister behind his car, she says "If only they could put a reflective surface inside the car so you can see what's behind you!" But her anger at Richie was misplaced. The whole thing where she tells Richie to scram, thinking that Lina would never see him again after the accident, was straight out of Sitcom Misunderstanding Land, and I never believed it for a second; Lina is a kind soul who was happy to meet Richie, and we all knew she was going to forgive him. We see that at the end, of course, after Lina wakes up. But, by then, Richie's just swallowed another bottle of pills. Cliffhanger! Anyway, let's hope this suicide tip Richie is on goes away soon.

The Kyle/Holly storyline is OK but it's going to need some help. She's finally forgiven him for what happened on prom night, but we still have to deal with the husband who channels Jim J. Bullock. It's a joke that's going to wear thin after a while, like the double-takes people took when people saw the Drummonds on Diff'rent Strokes. Kyle and Aaron make a nice couple, by the way, but I have to take issue with Aaron's profession: if he's a "software engineer for an Internet security company," then I'm a male model.

So that leaves the Nicole/Duncan storyline, which, I hate to say, has the potential to be the best one. And yes, I can tell that it's drifing towards Ross-and-Rachel territory, but there's some genuine chemistry between Andrea Anders and Jon Bernthal. That being said, the fact that Duncan is going to stay close to Nicole because he's going to remodel the house she and Yonk live in -- "This place is not well built!" is Duncan's surprising revelation after he recalls doing the drywall in the house years earlier -- is more than a bit contrived. But I'm curious to see how this little affair plays out; Yonk's not being written as an asshole, just a bit of a dopey lunk that loves his young wife, but not as much as winning the Super Bowl. And casting David Keith in the role was a good idea; he's young-enough looking to make the pairing with Anders believable. So we don't yet have anyone to root for in this triangle, which is at least a refreshing take on a tired sitcom convention.

By the way, the next episode is even funnier than this one, so I'd like to think that this show is just trying to find its legs. It's in a bit of a safe haven on CBS's Monday schedule, even if it's leading off the night, so there should be time for it to hit its stride. The second episode shows that it's definitely on its way.