The easiest way to describe Salem Rogers is Enlightened without a soul, Zoolander without comedy, or Selfie without a brain. Debuting on Amazon Instant Video this week as part of their fourth pilot season, Salem Rogers is a show packed with talent on both sides of the camera, yet it delivers an unpleasantly bitter script that seems to dodge its own purpose. It makes for a pilot that seems less married to its premise and development of characters than it does off-putting humor, relying on various cliches like fart gags and petty insults to drive its comedy.
It makes for a disappointing pilot; directed by Mark Waters (Mean Girls) and written by Lindsey Stoddart (whose done voice work for Bob’s Burgers, and appeared on 2 Broke Girls and Scrubs), Salem Rogers is an attempt at the satirical redemption story, told through the lens of Salem Rogers (About a Boy and Iron Man‘s Leslie Bibb), a former supermodel whose 10-year stint in rehab ends when the place is closed for being on sacred Indian ground (which leads to hilarious jokes, like a drunk Salem howling in a bar). When the Jenna Maroney clone stumbles upon former assistant-turned-self-help-author Agatha Todd (Rachel Dratch), the two team up to help Salem conquer her inner demons and the modeling world, proving that a 36-year old can still hang with the best of them.
Problem is, Salem Rogers forgot to make its two main characters human beings. Their interactions throughout the pilot are all self-centered, the show overcompensating in its attempt to paint Salem as a horrible human being and Agatha as the homely woman determined to have it all… which apparently consists of making a beautiful, arrogant, and self-centered woman famous once again.
The worst part about the pilot is how it actually rewards this kind of behavior: the premise consists of Salem getting drunk and screaming at a lot of people (mostly Agatha, who she consistently insults for the last 18 or so minutes of the pilot), and then getting opportunities handed to her on a silver platter. All throughout, the show wants us to think her proclamations about being “Model of the Year 1998” are ironic, and reveal something broken underneath the surface; unfortunately, everyone else still seems to subscribe to the theory that she’s special, even when all the dialogue is written to suggest she can’t (sample: “you come in here all old, looking for a job”, four seconds later she has a job offer).
The episode’s framing device doesn’t help this either. The opening and closing scenes take place six months from the rest of the pilot, and promise the audience that the lead character has no intentions of changing, because that would just be a horrible, horrible thing. That knowledge makes Salem such an unlikable character, it’s impossible to recover from; and with Agatha being an equally self-centered, completely ignorant human being all to herself, it leaves the show with absolutely nobody for the audience to anchor themselves to emotionally.
If you like horrible people being cruel to each other, than being rewarded for it, then maybe Salem Rogers is for you. There’s no doubting there’s promise in the show’s premise; had the show forced Salem to take a job as Agatha’s assistant (instead of her just bullying Agatha into thinking she’s writing a book about helping Salem, when she’s just using her as an assistant again), there would be a lot more emotional and comedic promise to the vapid human beings we’re presented with in the pilot. Yes, these are characters who are in desperate need of growing as people – oddly, it doesn’t seem like Salem Rogers is interested in challenging them in any kind of significant, unique way. Instead, it’s easier to make Indian jokes and laugh at the girl who isn’t blonde and hot. While its attitude certainly fits in the vein of Mean Girls, the satire doesn’t land, thanks to a combination of unfunny jokes (like Slim Jim fart jokes, or jokes about Salem getting STD’s!) and two characters whose self-interest drown out any kind of attempts at cathartic storytelling. I’ll pass.
[Photo via Amazon]
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