As the gleam in Ryan Stiles’ eye and Colin Mochrie’s bald head lit the stage, the opening moments of “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” hinted that though the cast was now cute and aged, the same wily pranksters filled those chairs. The return of back-to-back episodes was bursting with promise.
But soon the audience would be plagued with disheartening questions like: “What if it’s not what I want?,” “Where are Ryan’s blue shoes?” and, most of all, “Where is Drew Carey?”
As the original American host, Carey made sure the jokes didn’t stop after the games. He and the constant flux of comedic material generated by regulars Ryan Stiles, Colin Mochrie and Wayne Brady built such a beautiful, homey rapport that it felt like the improvisation could never fail. Everyone ragged on Carey, he ragged on himself and he had quippy one-liners to welcome the audience back to a show where “the points don’t matter...”
But now that talk show hostess Aisha Tyler has taken his place, her admittedly fabulous bangs don’t compensate for that camaraderie. She nasally drones descriptions of the games that are so confusing and long-winded, you can only piece it together as the performers improvise them onstage. And while Carey always joined his compatriots in the last game of the show, whether it be an Irish drinking song or hoedown, Tyler doesn’t seem like she’d be hoe-down for anything.
The games themselves got off to a rocky start. Opening with the game show of love contestants, the boys immediately over-played the sexual innuendo with a Colin-on-Wayne kiss. Perhaps in the old days, the audience would have been shocked and sated, but it’s 2013. Guys kissing guys isn’t enough. It’s desensitized and expected, not improvisational — especially with these guys who seize every opportunity to show affection. Ryan Stiles demonstrated this point by then promptly rubbing on some chapstick, preparing for his own predictable smooch.
That being said, sometimes the most riotous laughs come from the performers crawling all over each other. There was something endearing about Brady’s incredulous chuckle into the ground as Stiles pretended his hands were frozen to the “toboggan” of the former’s sculpted buns. There was also a fantastic new game introduced in the second episode where props and three of the performers lie horizontally on a mat, allowing the actors to be acrobatically imaginative as genres such as “poltergeist” and “cirque de solei” were shouted, the audience looking down on them from a camera held above.
Despite the charming introduction of other new games, including one where Mochrie and Stiles had to act out a scene using only the things in random audience members’ bags, there were a number of missteps. Heinous hashtags like #bromance littered the edge of the screen non-discreetly in every game.
The over-inundation of cloying, shameless promotion didn’t end there as actors from “Glee” and “The Walking Dead” stepped out to fill the silent role usually taken by audience members. The wordless participation reserved for Carey’s hilarious random picks is now a plug for other shows.
Admittedly, Kevin McHale did superbly as a stand-in, but unlike “The Walking Dead” star, he has comedic timing and facial expression. He’s not from a zombie drama where there is no comic respite ever.
Yet the wit and friendship of the old cast, arguably the main focus, was its own reward. And since the second episode was dramatically better than the first, the audience has to hope it will just take a few to get back into the swing of things.
