There are enough moments in “Call Me Kat” that are close to work that they become even more frustrating when they don’t. Good enough ingredients to make a broadcast success are there, most notably Mayim Bialik starring as Kat, her first regular TV role since “The Big Bang Theory” made her a TV mainstay. A solid supporting cast – including Swoosie Kurtz, Kyla Pratt and Leslie Jordan – accompanies her as she takes her revenge for the camera, who becomes another character as Kat constantly speaks directly to her. And in one of the show’s best creative decisions, Darlene Hunt’s “Call Me Kat” doesn’t allow Kat, a 39-year-old single from Louisville who left the gym to open her own cat café, to become the spinster cliché she could Tue.
When her restless mother (Kurtz) asks if she is not afraid of becoming “a sad cat lady”, for example, Kat just smiles, takes one of her many cats and insists that she will be “a rad Lady of the cat. “It’s not a line that deserves the burst of laughter from the audience that it gets right away, but it’s at least one that makes it clear that Kat isn’t a completely depressing mess just because she’s a 39-year-old single who left the gym to open her own cafeteria cat. She genuinely, mainly, likes her life.
This, unfortunately, is the most interesting that the program achieves in the first four episodes. “Call Me Kat” is ostensibly based on “Miranda”, a crazy comedy by British comedian Miranda Hart. For her own iteration of the show, “Call Me Kat” takes the (very) basic premise of “Miranda” of “a woman in her late thirties runs a store and doesn’t have a boyfriend” and Hart’s characteristic fourth wall breaks in which she chatted with the audience, made funny faces and shared some of the thoughts she didn’t dare speak out loud to the characters right in front of her. (For those unfamiliar with “Miranda”, think of “Fleabag” with the score of an enthusiastic studio audience.) Kat’s mother, like Miranda’s, is a concerned eccentric who just wants her to marry, already. And like Miranda, Kat longs for her beautiful friend, this time played by Cheyenne Jackson. Its dynamics is another point that suffers when compared directly to the one that inspired it in “Miranda”, where Hart and Tom Ellis had an immediately recognizable romantic chemistry, despite the crazy hijinks that surround them all the time. In “Call Me Kat”, Bialik and Jackson can barely keep their friendly banter afloat, let alone hint at the possibility of anything beyond that.
Bialik is an enthusiastic protagonist who launches headlong into the challenge of playing Kat as a more accomplished person than her logline would suggest. But she doesn’t have as tight a grip on tone and shape as Hart did, and often feels that she is giving an American impression of Hart’s specifically British character and tone. Turning around and smiling at the camera may be a traditional sitcom tradition, but it’s also deceptively difficult to do without looking strangely unnatural, as is the case with “Call Me Kat”. Without a clearer central performance to support it, nor direction and cohesive editing enough to stitch everything together, the show struggles to maintain its own rhythm and becomes more shocking than charming.
“Call Me Kat” airs on Thursdays at 9 pm on Fox.