‘Two Guys and a Girl’ Is Amiable Enough

Seinfeld is often cited as a key turning point for the “smartening up” of modern sitcoms, but its impact at the time (the show’s lengthy run spanned almost an entire decade, from 1989 to 1998) did not immediately upend the old-fashioned, innocuous sitcom formula, those light-as-a-feather concoctions whose very disposability was considered their primary selling point, and that to an overworked audience that just wanted to get home, kick off their shoes and shut down their brain.

Case in point: Two Guys and a Girl, a laugh track-driven trifle that ran from 1998 to 2001 and featured a young Ryan Reynolds, whose recent, box office record-setting turn in Deadpool is no doubt a huge selling point in why this set is suddenly seeing a release after all these years. The show is no real lost classic, but it has its charms: the cast as a whole is on the money, and it does feature strong female characters perfectly adept at holding their own with the boys, but the series is nonetheless stupendously old-fashioned in its insistence on defining its characters solely by a combination of their relationships and career goals. These folk seem to have zero interests or pastimes that don’t feed directly into one or both of those pursuits.

This wouldn’t be a major fault in and of itself — God only knows there have been plenty of equally one-dimensional sitcoms produced both before and after — but when the characters flit about aimlessly from one job or relationship to another as much as these do, there are no real stakes involved. No one ever seems down on their luck, and there’s never any real question that things are going to work out fine for all involved.

As with many shows of its day, Two Guys and a Girl displays a mercenary disregard for its secondary and tertiary characters; for example, during the first two seasons the series was known by the bloviated alternate title Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Parlor, during which time the two male leads, Pete (Richard Ruccolo) and Berg (Reynolds) pay their way through college by working at the titular pizza joint owned and operated by an older gentleman named Bill (Julius Carry). For season two, Bill is unceremoniously dropped from the show, even as Pete and Berg continue working in the parlor under apparently absentee management! Such rapid fire changes were all too common in the days that preceded the possibility of binge watching, but can seem rather jarring to modern audiences accustomed to more stringent metrics of continuity.

That breach of continuity extends somewhat to the characters themselves as well: Pete’s initial love interest, a serious relationship with Melissa (a wonderful Jennifer Westfeldt) that is understood to be headed toward marriage as season one opens, is jettisoned without solemnity at that season’s end. Behind the scenes revelations would later indicate that much of season one’s incoherence was the result of episodes being aired out of order, but it demonstrates a lack of care and commitment on the producers’ part which is not rectified on this DVD set, with the episodes present here in the order they were aired rather than written.

Season two sees things beginning to settle down a bit, with several new characters joining the fray: Ashley (Suzanne Cryer, currently a highlight of HBO’s Silicon Valley) begins as Berg’s medical school competition before quickly becoming a love interest. Ashley proves to be slightly unhinged in ways that appear designed for no other purpose than to provide comedic strife for Berg, but Cryer imbues the character with much needed pathos. Sharon (Traylor Howard), the title “girl” in the equation, finally secures a long term beau in the form of Johnny, played by a young Nathan Fillion. Add in a recurring love interest for Pete (told you it was straight romance and careerism for this show) played by Tiffani Thiessen in season 3, and for whatever its faults Two Guys and a Girl couldn’t be accused of skimping on the cast.

I’m being hard on the show. It’s certainly amiable enough, and fans of Ryan Reynolds’ comedy shtick (I count myself as one) will enjoy witnessing his funny bone in embryonic-yet-potent form here, but over the course of 80 episodes the non-commitment, the endless fluff, begins to wear thin. Relationships — such as the one between Berg and neurotic neighbor Irene later in the series — seem thrown together more by circumstance than chemistry, and the aforementioned ping ponging around from career to career in the case of most major characters result in a show too slight to emotionally engage in. Watch it for the surprisingly robust cast and oft-inspired “theme” episodes, and Two Guys and a Girl is a consistently fun if rarely thrilling find.