Another post about the new NBC series, Thank God You're Here. As I mentioned, last Saturday night I was with a group of people who excel at improv comedy and have studied it with the best teachers and co-improvisers in the world. There, the buzz on the new show was uniformly negative to the point of disgust. This article by Dan Kois sounds like a transcribed summary of those complaints.
I agree with everything in the article but I will add the following, not so much in defense of the show as explanation. Some of the press releases claim the show is "improv" but the producers themselves don't seem to be claiming that, and the folks using that term don't seem to mean "improv" in the classic tradition of Second City, Viola Spolin, The Groundlings, Del Close, Nichols and May, etc. In classic improv, the goal is to create a scene that is natural and organic and, if possible, funny. On Thank God, the goal seems to be to create an instant blooper reel where one player on stage (and only one) is in trouble and we can laugh at his predicament and perhaps applaud how he gets out of it.
There are some theater games in the classic tradition that revolve around one person not knowing who he is or what the scene is about…but even in those, as played at Second City, no one has any advance prep. So it's a challenge for the one naïve performer to guess what has been predetermined but it's also a challenge for the others in the scene to hint and convey that information for him. Everyone is improvising. The producers of Thank God seem to have decided that it's more fun to stack the deck against the one player. The improv vets who are criticizing the show know from past experience that the "real thing" would be more entertaining.