ABC's Bless This Mess features likable stars in a cliche-heavy pilot

The Hollywood Reporter

The comedy about a New York hipster couple, played by Lake Bell and Dax Shepard, who move into a Nebraska farmhouse has been done before. (Bell and New Girl's Liz Meriwether originally created Bless This Mess for Fox.) "You'll have to let me know if any part of that scenario sounds fresh or revelatory to you, because the first 22 minutes of Bless This Mess rely too heavily on, 'Man, I can't believe we're still doing that joke in 2019' tropes and hackneyed beats," says Daniel Fienberg. "Guess what? It turns out that the yuppies have every bit as much to learn from the bumpkins as vice versa, which would seem like it was subverting the genre, except that that's exactly what the conventions of the genre have always been. Nothing in how Bless This Mess initially approaches Nebraska suggests any regionally specific or time-period-specific authenticity."

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