In short: probably. But then again, what isn’t?
Going into Chuck Lorre’s new Netflix endeavor, Disjointed, I assumed the worst. A half-hour weed sitcom with a laugh track, created by the man who brought the scourge that is Two and a Half Men, seemed like a pretty bad idea. Upon viewing the pilot, which was the only episode I was able to sit through without screaming, it may have been.
Kathy Bates plays the owner of a dispensary, staffed by three wacky budtenders and a security guard who doesn’t smoke weed but does have PTSD. Bates speaks with an indiscernible accent—Baltimore? Outer-borough?—and has long, flowy hair. Her son, a mixed-race MBA student, is the straitlaced stick in the mud to his mother’s free-flowing, unleashed, smoke ‘em if you got ‘em spirit. The result of this setup is essentially a workplace comedy, but with weed instead of office supplies. It would be funny-ish if recreational marijuana wasn’t legal anywhere in the country.
The jokes are bad. The laugh track is distracting. Free from the shackles of television, the characters pepper their dialogue with curse words and rely heavily on stale, well-trod marijuana jokes, including an extended bit during which Pete, a long haired budtender wearing a drug rug, is so blazed that he speaks to the weed plants in the back of the store in an Australian accent. The best part about the few episodes I watched are the interludes that take the place of commercial breaks that are all weed-themed. The attorneys at Young & High LLP will help you if the pizza you ordered (because you’re high) is late. In a semi-inspired parody of a beer commercial, two cowboys take bong rips while sitting on horses, as a stentorian VO plays over stock footage of fields of verdant green plants. I don’t think I laughed, but I did say “Hm, that’s clever.”
There’s a chance that I would enjoy this show much more if I were high, but that’s because almost everything is entertaining when I’m high. A Canadian show about competitive cheerleaders called Cheer Squad that would be terrible when sober is oddly absorbing after a joint and a big glass of ice water. Watching one cat stalk the other through the living room becomes my own scintillating version of Planet Earth. Disjointed is clearly intended to be watched sober, but if you’re going to watch it anyway, I sincerely recommend doing so with weed.
