Bad Teacher Pilot: Divorced Dudes

We stumbled across the first episode of a new comedy series on CBS based upon the movie Bad Teacher starring Cameron Diaz. It’s been a while since we’ve seen that movie and it was quite entertaining, so we gave the TV series a whirl.

Ari Graynor plays Meredith Davis, a trophy wife who was just dumped by her cheating spouse, a yacht salesman. Meredith isn’t getting a penny due to an ironclad prenup so she moves in with her friends, whining that she has no money, no car, no home and nothing to do. Her friend says, great, she can pick her kid up from school. Meredith picks up Lily on single daddy day and decides to get a job at the school teaching. She’s not a teacher? No problem. A fake resume will fix that and she’ll be on her way to snagging a rich divorced dad with her bikini-ready bod.

Sara Rodier plays the kid, Lily, who is not one of the cool kids at school and Meredith takes Sara and her uncool friends under her wing to teach them to cope with the mean girls.

David Alan Grier plays recently divorced Principal Carl, who strikes up a bond with Meredith, more because she is someone he can talk to, as opposed to all the leering that you just know is going to go on. We love David Alan Grier long time. He forever locked up a place in our hearts years ago with his Maya Angelou Fruit Loops commercial.

And of course, even though Meredith is looking the easy life, there’s flirty, sexy Joel, the gym teacher, whom she actually went to high school with. Joel is played by Ryan Hansen

Sarah Gilbert plays Irene, a mousy and apparently friendless teacher, who attaches herself to Meredith. And Kristin Davis is Ginny, who likes to torment Irene and plans to go after Meredith, too.

So Meredith gets the job she is not qualified and volunteers for safety guard duty when she finds out there’s a stipend. She intervenes when the mean girls bully the safety guards, but Lily is not impressed because it’s easy for Meredith. She was a cool kid in school. She’ll find a rich husband and leave and Lily and her friends will still be at the mercy of the bullies.

Meredith sets up a career day with the kids bringing in their rich single dads but Ginny has been checking up on her and tries to expose her fraudulent credentials in front of everyone. Quick-thinking Meredith cooks up a story about having a stalker and even gets Joel to agree to get his cop brother to give her a restraining order to prove it. One rich dad, also a doctor, is so impressed he invites Meredith to his weekend retreat. She is going to go when she runs into her little team of safety guards who have been kicked out of the lunch room by the mean girls. As the doctors beckons her to join him in his Porsche, Meredith can’t bring herself to leave the girls to handle their dilemma alone. She helps them put the bullies in their place and blows off her lost opportunity with the doctor. His Porsche was 2 years old and there was no way she was getting together with him. But, by the end of the episode, she wakes up to find that she has spent the night with Joel.

The show is already being panned by some reviewers – clichés, supporting characters not fleshed-out enough, it needs a story arc, and we suppose these reviewers have watched and not much liked 3 episodes by now. But we’re not that critical. We’re just looking for something funny to watch on Thursday night now that they took Rake away, so Bad Teacher works for us.