NBC's Connecting succeeds where other quarantine shows fail

Variety

"An understandable if tricky to navigate instinct during these many months of quarantine is the instinct to create meaningful art out of These Times," says Caroline Framke. "Even as the entire world goes on pause, creativity marches stubbornly on, hoping to make sense out of senseless things. But with no end in sight, it’s just about impossible for any art about the pandemic made during the pandemic to shed much light on what’s happening besides the fact that everyone feels like they’re losing their minds. That’s held true for TV shows about life in isolation that lean heavily on social distancing and Zoom. Something like Freeform’s Love in the Time of Corona or HBO’s Coastal Elites, while well-intentioned, failed to capture much about this era beyond the fact that it’s surreal. On the face of it, Connecting…, NBC’s new show about socially distanced friends shot in quarantine, seemed like it might not be any different. Instead, it’s a surprisingly sharp comedy that uses familiar sitcom beats to tackle a completely unfamiliar situation."

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• Connecting offers some radical catharsis: "We are people in desperate need of emotional catharsis, which Connecting… delivers with refreshing authenticity," says Chelsea Steiner. "And while we are inundated with COVID-19 coverage on the news and online, we have barely seen it handled in pop culture. It is a bracing relief then to see our own experience reflected back to us in this comedy. Connecting… artfully taps into the rollercoaster of emotions we’ve all experienced in the last 8 months. I can’t remember the last time a network series has affected me so deeply."
• Connecting is inoffensively frivolous in comic moments, clunky and glib when it goes dramatic: "Connecting… does decently with the frivolous part of the equation, but I find something genuinely unpleasant about using abrupt, unearned emotional nods to George Floyd's murder as a one-off TV comedy kicker," says Daniel Fienberg. "Although the cast has been directed in the same broad strokes as have marred so many of these quarantine productions — "Look directly into the camera, get too close to the microphone and yell" — it's a reasonably likable group, with a reasonably relatable/likable group of basic dilemmas. One can imagine them slotting in comfortably between Single Guy and Friends in a retro Must-See-TV NBC lineup."
• Connecting does indeed connect: "Some of it is quite funny," says Brian Lowry, "like Pradeep (Parvesh Cheena), who spends most of his video calls hiding from his screaming, unseen children. Appropriately, the show keeps coming back to the melancholy associated with the state of the world, from Rufus (Ely Henry) beginning a chat by saying 'I've been better' to Annie quietly asking, 'We'll go back to hanging out in person, right?' In something that's too rarely seen in network sitcoms, the friends are also in very different places economically, with some at best just getting by and others well situated for the pandemic, so much so that they're kind of sheepishly enjoying the opportunity to cocoon at home."
• Creators Martin Gero and Brendan Gall were inspired by shows like Cheers: "It evolved pretty quickly," says Gero. "Brendan and I are lucky that we belong to this very tight kind of friend group that are mostly Canadian ex-pats, and we have a standing Sunday night dinner at someone’s house. We really mourned the loss of that when the stay-at-home orders came into place. But a crazy thing happened, which is we started talking more, the whole group, and we’re having these very profound and very funny conversations. It felt like that’s maybe a show. Both Brendan and I had a great love of these old, single room sitcoms like Cheers, and it felt like that was a way to do it. Zoom would be our single room, and this is a way to just talk and process what’s going on."