With a name like Best Time Ever, expectations are high. While host Neil Patrick Harris did his job as well as he could, the variety show’s premiere faltered as it tried too hard to make people have a good time.
The premiere of Neil Patrick Harris’ new variety show wasn’t exactly the best time ever. Confusing or excessive would be more fitting adjectives.
Best Time Ever with Neil Patrick Harris is NBC’s latest attempt to not only revive the variety show itself — remember the much better The Maya Rudolph Show in 2014? — but also to bring back a TV format that used to make the Peacock Network a lot of money back in the day (The Sound of Music Live anyone?).
Sorry to say, NBC, but Neil Patrick Harris isn’t Dean Martin. At least, not yet he isn’t.
Best Time Ever tried so hard to deliver "the best time" that it missed all the marks in which it could have delivered a sincerely good time.
The outrageous tone of the evening was set immediately when Reese Witherspoon revealed herself to be the “one-time guest announcer.” Celebrity cameos can be stupendous, but this seemed too telling of how hard the producers of the show were trying to rake in an audience. Witherspoon had as much purpose as Chrissy Teigen on Spike’s Lip Sync Battle, except there was significantly less cleavage this time around.
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Even more pointless is Nicole Scherzinger, who “co-hosts” the show. The necessary Pussycat Dolls joke was made, so now it seems like her duty has been filled.
The segments blew the ridiculousness level through the roof. Variety shows work when they bring in fresh sketches and a new kind of, well, variety to a program. Best Time Ever just chose to take note from Oprah, The Sing-Off, American Ninja Warrior, Punk’d and Deal or No Deal. No joke.
Gloria Gaynor sang nothing other than “I Will Survive” while people on their couches were live-streamed into the broadcast to do some karaoke. Though, karaoke on Best Time Ever just means the player has to know ONE WORD. How hard is it to follow up “I’ve got all my life to live” with “I’ve got all my love to GIVE.” All they had to do was fill in the word “give.” Come on.
Then NPH took on Witherspoon in a climbing/ ziplining challenge. The contraption looked like it was straight out of American Ninja Warrior. Good thing because that series’ host Matt Iseman was there to narrate while NPH and Witherspoon climbed.
Harris then Punk’d the coaches of The Voice in a segment that could have been tremendously better had they given NPH full reign to be his hilarious self. The Austrian character was subpar, and the show really missed a great opportunity to see if Adam Levine and company would have turned their chairs around for the Tony-winning actor.
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Next, NPH played a trivia-based Deal or No Deal-esque game with an audience member that seemed so low-staked that the tension that drives Deal or No Deal was entirely absent. He gave her a multiple choice current events quiz. What’s so zany about that? Well, she did win a Jeep.
To culminate the evening, NPH decided to recreate some moments from Cocktail and backflip off a pogo stick while Pitbull’s “Don’t Stop the Party” was obnoxiously paired with a basic lighting display and random people dancing.
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Nothing felt like it was part of a new regime of variety shows. Instead, Best Time Ever chose to sample from all of the previously successful reality series and call the aggregated result a variety show. It needs fresh games to play. It needs to not feel like it has to give out Oprah-worthy prizes in order to be worth it.
It needs to let Neil Patrick Harris be Neil Patrick Harris.
NPH is the definition of a Renaissance Man. He sings, dances, acts, hosts, does magic, is a loving husband and father and, now, can apparently backflip off a pogo stick. The only reason the show didn’t flop completely is because of how sure NPH is in doing his job. He’s quick on his feet and unbelievably enigmatic in just about anything he does. Let him be himself instead of making him run around doing these spinoffs of reality shows.
Also, next time David Burtka is sitting in the audience and shown several times on camera, USE HIM.
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