Your Vulture Upfronts: Judge the New NBC Comedies

In the last week, NBC has picked up lots and lots and lots of new shows. (See the full schedule here.) These are the videos you’ll need — clips from all five of NBC’s new comedies — to judge them properly. Outsourced, which took Parks and Recreation’s spot on the Thursday schedule, and Love Bites will be the only two airing this fall. Perfect Couples, Friends With Benefits, and The Paul Reiser Show, about a guy an awful lot like Paul Reiser, are mid-season replacements. Be warned: Nothing you’re about to see is going to give you great confidence that NBC is about to turn this all around, but, please, judge for yourself. Which of these shows would you have picked up, and which would you have left well enough alone? (You can judge the NBC dramas here.)

Outsourced is about a white guy who goes to work for his company’s call center in India. There are some jokes about how Indian names are hard to pronounce and funny sounding.


Love Bites is a “comedy anthology series,” which means every week we’ll get a story about single-lady friends Annie and Frannie (Ugly Betty’s Becki Newton and My Boys’ Jordana Spiro,), mixed in with one-off story lines starring the likes of, oh, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Greg Grunberg, and Craig Robinson (all present and accounted for in clip No. 3).

The clips from Friends With Benefits, about five twentysomethings doing it, only contain two of those twentysomethings, because another two of those twentysomethings are being recast. In the meantime, it’s left to Party Down’s Ryan Hansen to anchor the show. Be warned, that kissing scene in the first clip is truly grotesque.


Perfect Couples is about three couples with different vibes (normal, crazy, perfect).


The Paul Reiser Show, or Curb Your Enthusiasm with Paul Reiser.

Your Vulture Upfronts: Judge the New NBC Comedies