The scripting doesn’t help matters, either. If you’re paying attention to the premiere, watch out for how every single main character’s profession is brought up in conversation within the first ten minutes. “Professor, you’re not teaching your ethics class” or “I’m a doctor, I’ll do it for free right now” – the show is so lazy in structure and pay-off that it can’t just leave visual hints about its characters and instead quite literally spells them out for you from the get-go.
The pilot’s arc follows Mitch on a quest to get a babysitter so he and his wife and gang can go rage at a Jay-Z concert. Apparently babysitters (or, you know, other friends, or family) are impossible to come by in Truth Be Told‘s brilliantly realized alternate universe, leading Mitch and Tracy to hire a young college student at the last minute. But Mitch thinks she’s hot and he’s so worried that she’ll make a move on him (obviously he wouldn’t touch her, he’s married!) that he thinks they should fire her. Oh, and she’s a porn star because this is 2015 and the thought of someone sexually comfortable in their own skin is still hilarious.
That’s it. The rest of the pilot is mostly just Mitch and Russell laughing at the misfortune of others (service workers, Jewish people, other parents), and I’m not even going to expound upon the fact that the writers believe their scripting solid enough to have the gall to make jokes around Mitch’s attempt to use the N-word not fifteen minutes into the premiere. There’s an occasional outlier of a line that gets delivered with vague élan (Russell wondering aloud, “What is she?” regarding Tracy’s ethnicity, or some of Gosselaar’s reactions to other character’s outbursts), but there’s just no denying it: Truth Be Told is the worst premiere of the fall, of many falls. I’ll never know how the show wraps up its epic saga of suburban schadenfreude, and, truth be told (had to do it), I am entirely okay with that.
