Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries - Significant Others: Local TV Guide

Significant Others aired from March until December 2004 on Bravo.

An unusual semi-improvised comedy about four couples going through marriage counseling, and events in and out of their sessions. Straightlaced James ( Brian Palermo) and freespirited Chelsea ( Andrea Savage) were quickly married, and were just now getting to know each other; Ethan and Eleanor ( Herschel Bleefeld, Faith Salie) were coping with the imminent birth of a child; wellmeaning Bill ( Fred Goss) and uptight Connie ( Jane Edith Wilson) were dealing with his recent unemployment and issues of communication; and Devon and Alex ( Chris Spencer, Nicole Randall Johnson) were a successful couple who argued constantly. Most of the stories were about sex, including arguments , infidelity, erictile problems, the "blame game," strange relatives, Eleanor's miscarriage and Bill and Connie's near divorce.

A Review from Slate Magazine

television: What you're watching.
Insignificant Others
No bravos for Bravo's new sitcom.
By Dana Stevens
Wednesday, March 10, 2004,

For months, Bravo has been circulating self-congratulatory buzz about its new laugh-track-free, improvisational sitcom Significant Others. According to network president Jeff Gaspin, it's "the kind of comedy you'd expect to find on Bravo, where edginess and creativity thrive. We feel this series is funny, relatable, and it is groundbreaking television that exemplifies the artistic freedom granted by this medium." Right on, Prez. Except that for all the crowing about formal inventiveness, Significant Others ultimately relies on the hoariest of sitcom formulas: two people trading insults on a couch.

The series, which debuted in two back-to-back half-hour episodes last night, follows three fictional L.A. couples through the life crises that have led them into marriage counseling. Connie (played by Jane Edith Wilson) is a prim, humorless woman whose husband Bill (Fred Goss) has been in midlife freefall since losing his job six weeks ago. Chelsea (Andrea Savage) and James (Brian Palermo) are newlyweds just beginning to discover that her free-spirited approach to life clashes with his buttoned-down rigidity. And Ethan (Herschel Bleefeld) is a slacker man-boy who fancies himself a songwriter and reacts to his scholarly wife Eleanor's (Faith Salie) pregnancy by regressing even further into his callow cocoon. (A fourth, African-American couple played by Chris Spencer and Nicole Randall Johnson, is featured prominently in the PR kit and on the Web site, but has yet to appear after three episodes, in a bizarre bit of multicultural bait-and-switch.)

Like HBO's cult hit Curb Your Enthusiasm, Significant Others is loosely scripted by a team of writers, with the talented actors (many of them veterans of troupes like the Groundlings) supplying the dialogue on-set. But unlike Curb, an absurdist spoof of Hollywood manners structured around the abrasive yet curiously appealing presence of creator Larry David, Significant Others lacks the ingredient crucial for successful satire: heart. David and his cohorts are funny because, in spite of their incessant kvetching and transparently self-serving antics, we care about them and, by extension, their silly, low-stakes struggles. The shrill, vacuous denizens of Significant Others' curiously depopulated L.A. manage to perform the same trick in reverse: They take the high-stakes issues of real-life cohabitation—infidelity, childbirth, depression—and drain them of significance. An example: After squeezing several scenes out of Ethan's queasiness at his wife's new pregnancy, the show resorts to a gross-out gag at the Ob-gyn's office, where a woman's water breaks, drenching the horrified Ethan's brand-new sneakers. It's as if we're supposed to think, simultaneously, "Ethan is insensitive to the wonders of the female body!" and "Yuck! Baby juice!"

The couples-therapy scenes, where each couple talks directly into the camera as if addressing an off-screen analyst, offer the most promising framework for the actors to ad-lib and explore. After all, the free associations and awkward silences of real-life therapy are similar to onstage improv. But by jump-cutting between punch lines and editing out the interstitial material, director Robert Roy Thomas (who also co-created the show) breaks whatever improvisational rhythm the performers have established. The therapy scenes thus become manic, herky-jerky montages that showcase the characters' vanity and petty lies, while hastily eliding the real emotions—anger, resentment, a desire to connect—that would make these self-deceptions both funny and moving. Thomas came up with the idea for the series while directing commercials, where, as he explains in an interview, "the cameras would stop and the actors would be goofing around, saying things in character, and it would be funny and everyone would leap on it." Unfortunately, the stock domestic situations the show's writers have created for the gamely mugging cast seldom rise above the level of TV-commercial conflict: Leggo my Eggo, honey!

Significant Others' cheap, cynical misanthropy left me despairing less for the ailing genre of the sitcom than for the institution of marriage itself, which seems infinitely less threatened by the prospect of expanding to include same-sex partners than by the heterosexual self-loathing documented, and possibly engendered, by shows like this. Maybe marriage, like the sitcom, really is over as we know it. If shows like Significant Others represent the dying gasps of both, here's to whatever comes next.

A Review from entertainyourbrain.com

"Significant Others" Review

By Shawn McKenzie 06/29/2004

One of the best comic devices on TV is arguing. Everyone loves to watch and laugh at conflict. Things are no different on Bravo’s unique comedy “Significant Others.”

This show followed three couples in and outside of marriage counseling (one of the couples was dropped after the fourth episode and a different couple replaced them in the fifth episode.) It ran for six episodes and featured an ensemble of improvisational actors and comedians who came up with most of the scripts themselves. The first couple is uptight businessman James (Brian Palermo), a financial analyst, and Chelsea (Andrea Savage), his more liberal wife. They have been married for only three months, and they are already having problems, like when Chelsea revealed that she had slept with roughly 200 men before she married him, and then revealed that she had been previously married to a guy named Breck (Nat Faxton.) She gets ticked off with him in a later episode when he chooses to go on a business trip to New York instead of joining her at a friend’s wedding where she is a bridesmaid. They also butt heads when James tries to set up his best friend Bob (Bryan Callen) with Chelsea’s best friend Cynthia (Erinn Carter) in an obvious attempt to tick her off, but it backfires when they get along very well, making Chelsea happy. The second couple is Eleanor (Faith Salie) and Ethan (Herschel Bleefeld.) They have been married for 18 months, and Eleanor reveals to him in the first episode that she is pregnant. Ethan is rather immature himself, so he doesn’t know how to handle his impending fatherhood. Things get worse when Eleanor’s dad Jack (Peter Jason) makes fatherhood look unappealing (he leaves them with a $2000 check though.) He gets some advice from his older brother Seth (Jamie Kaler), whom Eleanor thinks is gay, which seems to help. The third couple is Constance “Connie” (Jane Edith Wilson) and Bill (Fred Goss), a couple who have been together for 15 years (they are the couple that disappears after the fourth episode.) Bill is going through a midlife crisis, which has resulted in him losing his job and not in a big hurry to find another one. This is distressing for Connie, since she is a very organized person. His self-esteem is very low, which results in a lack of sex between him and Connie, but Connie’s sister Ginny (Mary Pat Dowhy) helps out in ways she hadn’t intended. What starts out as Ginny lecturing Bill on how to get his act together turns into a steamy affair. Bill gains his self-esteem back along with a new job eventually, but he has to keep the affair a secret. It finally comes out at Connie’s mother’s funeral about the affair, causing her to leave him. The fourth couple (who appear for the first time in the fifth episode) are Devon (Chris Spencer) and Alex (Nicole Randall Johnson), a couple who have been together for 9.7 years. They are the parents of their 9-year-old son named Rodney (Blake Hightower.) Most of their problems are whether they are raising their son correctly. Their first concern is with Rodney’s private school, which they feel is too touchy-feely. At a parent-teacher conference, Devon gets his butt kicked by a gay parent named Ian (Patrick Bristow) after he makes an offensive comment. Next, they are afraid that Rodney has become closer to their Mexican maid Carlotta (Ivette Gonzalez) than to them, so they go on a road trip, which is fun for them but they end up missing Carlotta. Each episode begins and ends with the couples arguing on the therapist’s couch, with appearances back there at intermittent times.

I liked the fact that none of the couples had anything to do with one another, except that they went to the same therapist. You never saw any crossover associations between the couples or anyone they knew (with one exception…the gay parent Ian was one of James’ co-workers.) When it looked like a storyline had nowhere else to go, they just swapped couples and started a new storyline. That’s not something that all comedies have the luxury of doing.

The unscripted aspect of the show is hardly noticed as the ensemble of talented actors act out the scenes flawlessly. While I don’t find it as funny as fellow unscripted comedy “Curb Your Enthusiasm” on HBO, I do find it as refreshing. Every argumentative couple from “The Honeymooners” to “All in the Family” to “Moonlighting” has been hilarious, and this show triples your pleasure with three couples! The fact that they come up with their own dialogue just makes it that much more real. Not every episode ends with a resolution, and in fact, some episodes end with the couples in a worse state than when they began the episode.

Bravo has renewed “Significant Others” for a second season of six episodes, and I bet that they will rerun the first season before it premieres. Try to catch this distinctive comedy when it does return. Cable appears to be the only place to allow innovative comedies thrive, and this is one of them.

For more on Significant Others go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_Others