Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries - Help Me Help You: Ted Danson

Help Me Help You aired from September until December 2006 on ABC.

Dr. Bill Hoffman ( Ted Danson) was a famous and narcissistic New York therapist (" I have 12 degrees on the wall!"), and the author of several definitive psychotherapy texts, whose own life, predictably was a mess.Thrown out of his suburban home by his ex-wife Anne ( Jane Kaczmarek), and irate that his psychology-student daughter Sasha was dating a much older man, he spent his time counseling a small group of patients who were almost as screwed up as he was. Inger ( Suzy Nakamura) was a 25-year -old self made millionaire with no social skills or love life; Darlene ( Darlene Hunt), a sex addict who was also a therapy addict; Michael ( Jere Burns), an angry, disdainful businessman in court-ordered therapy but always on his blackberry; Jonathan( Jim Rash), a wiry, balding gay man in denial about his sexuality; and Dave ( Charlie Finn), a suicidal nebish who had jumped out of an office window only to land on his boss.

A Review from Variety

Help Me Help You
(Series -- ABC, Tue. Sept. 26, 9:30 p.m.)
By BRIAN LOWRY

Filmed in Los Angeles by Pointy Bird Prods. in association with Regency Television. Executive producers, Jennifer Konner, Alexandra Rushfield, Alex Reid; producer, Victor Hsu; co-producer, Diane Mercer; director, Brian Dannelly; writers, Konner, Rushfield.

Dr. Bill Hoffman - Ted Danson
Dave - Charlie Finn
Jonathan - Jim Rash
Inger - Suzy Nakamura
Darlene - Darlene Hunt
Michael - Jere Burns

ABC's development this year does its fair share of recycling, from "Men in Trees" channeling "Northern Exposure" to this in-need-of-therapy sitcom owing a debt to "Newhart." Therapy groups have long been fertile comedic ground, as has the notion of a counselor who can't follow his own advice, with Ted Danson filling those shoes here. Yet while his old-pro timing gives the show a modest lift, "Help Me Help You" provides more of an incentive to get off the couch than to plop down on one.
Series rifles through the various members under the care of Dr. Bill Hoffman (Danson), who pays lip service to all the usual self-help homilies but still pines for his ex-wife (Jane Kaczmarek, a part-timer on the show), who has hooked up with their car dealer. Bill's daughter Sasha (Lindsay Sloane), meanwhile, is keeping company with a much older fellow, adding to Bill's existential tsuris.

As for the group members, they run a fairly predictable gamut from the obviously gay guy (Jim Rash) in denial about his orientation to the fellow with anger-management issues (Jere Burns) to a multi-symptomatic sex addict (Darlene Hunt) to a suicidal office worker (Charlie Finn) who leaps out a window and lands on his boss.

Each is shown trying to put Bill's advice into action, with the best sequence involving Inger (Suzy Nakamura), a woman utterly lacking social skills with serious problems connecting with men. Asked why she's been surfing an Internet dating site that caters to Jews, she deadpans, "Because I'm not attracted to them."

Alas, that's really the show's only laugh-out-loud moment, and the supporting players are almost by definition such archetypes it will be difficult to get invested in them, putting most of the weight on Danson's shoulders. It's familiar territory for him, to be sure, though initially less interesting than his "Becker" role.

Notably, the series also repeats most of its premiere beats in the second half-hour -- in which Bill uncomfortably crashes his daughter's birthday party -- and makes a gross miscalculation by giving the gay character a sweet, doting wife, which seems more painful than funny. At this point, the show appears to be squandering Danson, who could certainly handle an extra dimension that simply isn't there.

As a practical matter, "Help Me" will need some help in a timeslot where its eventual lead-in -- another new half-hour, "The Knights of Prosperity" -- should provide a rather soft springboard.

On the plus side, this group of crazies will require years to benefit from Bill's tutelage, which, given the mortality rate of recent sitcoms, would be a nice condition to have.

A Review from The Washington Post

THE NEW SEASON TV Preview
'Help Me': A Cure for Couch Potatoes

By Tom Shales
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 26, 2006; Page C01

What killed the sitcom? Could it perhaps have been . . . The Sitcom?

That's the glibly simplistic explanation, but it's hardly groundless. Situation comedies became so overwhelming in number and so formulaic in execution over the decades that the typical sitcom seemed like a revival upon arrival.

Comes now Exhibit M, N, O or P: Ted Danson starring as Dr. Bill Hoffman in "Help Me Help You," a supposedly fresh sitcom arriving on ABC tonight in a big cloud of deja vu.

One reason for that sense, albeit a fairly minor one, is that the supporting cast includes Jere Burns playing a member of a group-therapy ensemble that Hoffman runs. Burns made his first big splash in sitcomedy back in 1988 when he played, of all things, a member of a similar group-therapy ensemble, this one run by Judd Hirsch. What goes around comes around, and around, and around.

Crispy and crackling, Danson handles the role of a troubled shrink a lot better than Hirsch did. And while we're making meaningless comparisons, "Help Me" and Dr. Hoffman are several steps up from "Becker," the last Danson sitcom, wherein he played a doctor whose most bitter pill was himself, dispensed liberally.

All those similarities bring us back to "why the sitcom seems kaput." And by "the sitcom," we especially mean the sort of gang's-all-here, three-camera, "taped before a live audience" kind of sitcom that dominated prime time for most of the '70s, '80s and '90s. There are hardly any such shows among the new network series rolling out this week and next.

It's always too early to say that any TV format is dead. Even westerns might come back (on HBO, with "Deadwood," they sort of did). "Help Me," however, is not the show to do the trick for the sitcom.

The show tries to be both a comedy about Hoffman's mess of a personal life and an ensemble show about all the members of the group -- Charlie Finn as Dave, who is clumsily suicidal; Jim Rash as Jonathan, in denial about being gay; and Suzy Nakamara as Inger, who has a laundry list of Relationship Issues ("I haven't had sex since my 19th birthday"), and so on.

As for Doc Hoffman, he's going through a midlife crisis as big as his awesome black Porsche (vanity plates: "4EVRJUNG"). Having told everyone in the group, repeatedly, that they should "connect" with someone else and "make a connection" before the next session, he makes one of the klutziest connections possible, accidentally climbing into bed with his ex-wife (the imposingly hilarious Jane Kaczmarek, formerly of "Malcolm in the Middle") and the used-car salesman she is dating.

"You sold me a crappy car, and now you're diddling my wife?" That's Danson's version of "J'accuse" the next morning around the breakfast table. Yes, he's somehow still there the next morning, and so is his teenage daughter, determined to immortalize excruciating moments on her camcorder. A little later, "Help Me" becomes the season's second new sitcom to attempt variations on "Seinfeld's" famous "make-up sex" joke, with Hoffman entreating his wife to indulge in not only "make-up sex" but also "break-up sex" and "wake-up sex."

Accumulating evidence indicates that "Seinfeld" will prove to be the last great sitcom of the age of the sitcom. Or -- the last great sitcom of the second trimester of television. Maybe phrasing it as simply as possible is the best way: "the last really funny TV show." "Seinfeld's" lofty and towering status is in no way challenged by "Help Me Help You," which is also no threat to "Cheers" as Ted Danson's shining and defining career achievement.

As luck would have it, "Help Me Help You" does not face extremely stiff competition in its Tuesday night time slot, so Danson and Kaczmarek might live to spat another day, and another week, and perhaps for the entire season. Then someone can use their show as proof that sitcoms are actually alive and well after all -- even though "Help Me Help You" begins its existence half-dead and quite deadly.

Help Me Help You (30 minutes) premieres tonight at 9:30 on Channel 7.

A Review from The Tufts Daily

TV Review | Ted Danson, do we really need your 'Help' any more?
Two and a half out of five stars
Diana Landes
Issue date: 9/29/06

Rejoice, college students! At long last, Ted Danson is finally back on television. This time, he's not playing an ex-ballplayer-turned-bartender or a disgruntled doctor. Actually...he is playing a disgruntled doctor, but now he's a psychiatrist. (On "Becker," he was just a regular physician.)

Danson returns to television on "Help Me Help You" as Dr. Bill Hoffman, a psychiatrist who just might be more messed up than his seriously messed-up patients. Hoffman holds group therapy sessions with five troubled souls every Tuesday at 9:30 p.m. on ABC.

Although "Help Me Help You" is not breaking any new comedic ground by covering therapy sessions, some of the characters' issues seem fresh. For instance, Inger (Suzy Nakamura) meets men on JDate, the Web site for Jewish singles, because apparently Jews are the only men who do not intimidate her. Dave (Charlie Finn), another therapy session attendee, starts visiting Dr. Hoffman after jumping out the window of his office building only to land on his boss, thus rendering the defenestration useless.

The other characters are a bit more textbook: There's your token anger management patient, a woman with every complex in the book - most glaringly, an unhealthy sexual appetite - and a gay guy in deep denial.

Meanwhile, their doctor has issues of his own: Hoffman's marriage of 20 years has crashed and burned, and, to top it off, his wife is sleeping with the guy who sold him his Volvo. In what was quickly diagnosed as a bout of "latent childhood anger over [Hoffman's] constant absence," his daughter Sasha (Lindsay Sloane) is dating her psychology professor, a man 30 years her senior.

Some parts of "Help Me Help You" are funny, though most of the show just personifies mediocrity. You can take it or leave it; the show is by no means painful to sit through, but its not a laugh-a-minute riot either.

Sitcoms don't have to be (and often aren't) full of hysterically funny moments, but they should be witty and smart - or at least goofy and irreverent. Given the nature of the show and its main characters, "Help Me Help You" should fall into the witty and smart category, but, unfortunately, its not quite there.

It remains to be seen whether or not audiences will grow to sympathize with any of these characters. Certainly, by the end of episode one, all rejoice as the suicidal guy meets a girl equally as depressed as he is, although the relationship is not multifaceted enough to evoke sincere interest just yet.

Inger is undoubtedly the most amusing character on the show: so self-aware, yet so unable to function normally in any sort of social setting. Nakamura's straight-faced delivery of her lines is well executed and provides some of the more entertaining moments on the show.

Danson has played so many cocky characters in his career that he could do the wacky narcissist thing with his eyes closed. And who can blame him? Even with a full head of grey hair, he still looks good.

Aside from his hair, his character is also a well known, well-off psychiatrist with 12 different medical degrees to his credit. It is clear that Hoffman is not used to losing, so after his wife confirms that she is leaving him, he tries to smash up his seemingly indestructible car. The scene mostly falls flat, but there is a small payoff for the viewer with a well trained eye and a basic knowledge of psychology: The license plate of his car reads "4everjung."

Ah, Carl Jung, not only are you one of the founders of modern psychology, but your name-that-is-not-pronounced-like-you-would-think finally provides a quality laugh on a not-so-spectacular sitcom.

An Article from IGN

IGN Interview: Suzy Nakamura
Help Me Help You's Inger talks World of Warcraft & more.
by Brian Zoromski
October 9, 2006 - Airing Tuesdays at 9:30pm ET/PT is the freshman ABC sitcom Help Me Help You. The single-camera comedy follows therapist Bill Hoffman (Ted Danson) as he helps his five group therapy patients and deals with his own personal issues. One of Dr. Hoffman's patients is socially inept Inger, played by Suzy Nakamura (Curb Your Enthusiasm, The West Wing). IGN TV recently had an opportunity to talk to Ms. Nakamura during a short break from filming.

In the next episode of Help Me Help You, airing Tuesday, Oct. 10, Inger gets caught up playing World of Warcraft and gets married in-game to a player by the name of "Frodo12." Inger tells her group that Frodo12 is a "high-level troll with his own island and he really cares about me." She invites Frodo12 to her real life apartment and we learn a lot about Inger and get an amusing take on World of Warcraft players.

IGN TV asked Ms. Nakamura if she based the socially stunted Inger on anyone in particular. "I know people like Inger," she replies, "but I think I've probably used a lot of different people in my life, and Inger's a composite of them. My brother used to play Dungeons & Dragons, and I remember going into the basement and watching him and his friends play. And I grew up reading comic books and playing some videogames. I have family members and I have friends who have either spent too much time by themselves in a lab somewhere, or studying one single thing where they become a little bit unsocialized. (laughs) I also know a dog who hasn't quite gotten used to his surroundings yet, so part of Inger is this dog that I know that is kind of afraid of everything. She's definitely a composite of different people -- and one animal -- in my life."

Anyone who's spent a lot of time gaming can relate to Inger and Frodo12. The episode doesn't paint gamers in a bad light, though (certainly not as bad as South Park's recent "Make Love, Not Warcraft" episode). Nakamura feels that videogames and gamers in general get overly criticized. "I think it's good to concentrate on one thing when you have a passion or an interest no matter what it is. I know computer games get a lot of flack and a lot of criticism because they feel it's unsocial, but I think there's a lot of benefits to it as long as it's balanced with other things."

So far on Help Me Help You we've seen Inger go on a very awkward (and very funny) first date and try out new experiences like using public phones and the subway, experiencing the latter with all of her senses. Nakamura says that in an upcoming episode Inger "has a hugging assignment, has a lot to do with physical contact, which she needs to work on." In another episode we find out that "the only personal contact she has is yelling at someone through a wall. It's a relationship with her neighbors, but only through their common wall."

The dialogue in Help Me Help You feels very fresh and funny, sometimes sounding a little improvised. We asked Nakamura how much is scripted and made up on the fly. "The writing is fantastic -- the writers and producers are on the set while we're shooting," Nakamura says. "Sometimes we'll shoot the scene completely scripted, word-for-word, and they'll come and say, 'Now say this,' 'now say that.' So they're writing on the spot, which is great, and a lot of times they'll give us one take where they'll say, 'OK, guys, you can say whatever you want.' A lot of times it's just sort of an exercise, 'cause maybe we're losing energy and they want us to get the energy up again, but sometimes they'll find little tidbits that we say that they get to keep. So it's a collaboration, but the first thing we do is what's in the script."

The next episode of Help Me Help You, titled "Fun Run," airs this Tuesday, October 10, at 9:30pm ET/PT.

For more on Help Me Help You go to http://www.wchstv.com/abc/helpmehelpyou/teddanson.shtml