Truth Be Told Season 1 Review

One episode was provided prior to broadcast.

It was after the seventh time that NBC’s masterfully awful media player crashed on me a laborious eighteen minutes into the premiere of the new fall “sitcom” Truth Be Told, that I realized something: there are no four minutes in the universe that could save this show from the eighteen cringe-worthy ones that preceded it. So, I gave up. Yep, I’m admitting from the get-go that I haven’t seen all of Friday’s big premiere for the Mark-Paul Gosselaar-starring series, but it’s still probably far longer than most will make it through when the show debuts after NBC’s similar trainwreck, Undateable.

The new show tells the story of Mitch (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) and wife Tracy (Vanessa Lachey), who are the parents of a four-year-old daughter and act like it’s the first time they’ve seen a human under ten each time she struts onto a set half-naked and in a princess crown. They live next door to their best friends (isn’t life weird!) Russell (Tone Bell) and Angie (Bresha Webb), also a married couple with crazy problems like text snooping and being overtly racist in ethnic food restaurants.

That’s Truth Be Told‘s most annoying quirk: it so desperately wants to stand on the forefront as an edgy, caustic comedy mired in “truths” and cutting commentary on class strife, racism, and adultery, but there’s so much running in opposition to this mission statement that it reaches a comical level of are they still trying the longer the show goes on. This is mainly because the awful dialogue is delivered by characters so wooden and flat they’d function better as coffee tables, and even then they’d be the result of a toddler’s attempt to build something from IKEA. It builds its stabs at edginess first, and characters and stories second, meaning that any of the unending attempts at truth-telling implode on the backs of such drastically under-realized creations as these.