It's upsetting to see a man with as much energy as Emeril Lagasse in a show that's obviously dead on its feet. The viewer is left to wonder whose idea it was to take a successful cable-TV chef and put him in a network sitcom in which the funniest and most entertaining segments are those in which he's cooking.
Even for a sitcom, "Emeril" is disjointed and unimaginative. The premise on which the plot is based -- at least I assume the plot was supposed to be based on something, and this was the most likely possibility--was Emeril's difficulty in balancing work and family life.
The show appears to have been periodically taken over by a writer who refused to speak to the other writers. The story frequently goes off on unrelated tangents -- which never develop into anything -- before returning to the main plot: the network asks Emeril to do additional shows, he is booked for various food-related conferences, he forgets his wife's birthday, he doesn't have time to buy her a gift nothing new, nothing entertaining, nothing in the slightest bit funny.
Of course, sitcoms aren't usually supposed to be new. That's the point -- to take a scenario the viewer is familiar with and make it entertaining through the use of characters and dialogue.
That also proves to be a problem with "Emeril."
The same folks who came up with the work vs. family plot sequence apparently came up with the show's stockroom characters. Besides Emeril himself, the cast consists of an overweight black woman with latent feminist tendencies; a slightly overweight middle-aged white woman who, along with Emeril's middle-aged male friend, never contributes to the storyline beyond making random, rambling soliloquies that were probably intended to be humorous and an anorexic image consultant, hired to make Emeril's cooking show more appealing to modern audiences, despite Emeril's own tastes.
Yawn.
And then the characters start talking. Not only is the dialogue not funny, it makes little sense. In one scene, Emeril addresses his male friend -- it is never explained to the audience who this man actually is, although he appears to be around an awful lot -- about the problems he is having trying to balance his career and family. His friend then goes off on a tangent about "Sex and the City" and women's issues with power in the bedroom. The plot proceeds to simply takes a break and an attempt to explain the relevance of this segment is never even made.
Then, of course, there is the ending. The conclusion to last evening's episode, for example, consisted of Emeril making a moralizing speech (a la the father in "The Brady Bunch") in which he explains to the outraged network execs that no, he doesn't want to take on more shows in a season because his family is important to him, and in order not to penalize his staff, he takes a pay cut while the rest of them get a raise -- it goes on and on.
I like Emeril. I like to watch his cooking show. But I cringed for him while watching his sitcom. He has energy, he's entertaining, and he's obviously trying, but it's simply not enough.
