TV is the New Reading

‘Samantha Who?’

is a lot of fun

Christina Applegate’s new character highlights her range as an actress. No matter how hard you stare at Samantha, she refuses to resolve simply into a grown-up version of Kelly Bundy (“Married ... With Children”). Her character – Samantha Newly on “Samantha Who?” – seems to be an entirely new creation.

This is admirable, considering that she arrives on the set of her own series a blank slate. A car accident put her in a coma for a week and upon waking up, she has no idea who she is. As she puts together what clues she encounters, she is unnerved by them. They seem to suggest she’s cheating on her boyfriend with a married man and that she’s rotten and self-absorbed. And when flashes of her personality surface – like when she unloads both barrels on an impatient woman at a party – she is horrified by them.

What Samantha realizes in the pilot episode is that her parents are odd, distant and more than a little opportunistic. She wakes to discover her mother, played magnificently by Jean Smart (“Designing Women” and “24”), using her coma as part of a video application for “Extreme Home Makeover.”

Her best friend, Andrea, played by the glamorous Jennifer Esposito, is a diva, which is why she couldn’t sit vigil at the hospital. Instead, Dena, a woman Samantha had ignored since childhood, sat with her. Dena, played by Melissa McCarthy (“Gilmore Girls”) is a bubbly funster who wants to rekindle the friendship that fell apart when Samantha became popular and, well, abandoned her.

Adding to the personality conflicts, the information that Samantha had been cheating on him strains Samantha’s relationship with her boyfriend, Todd, played by Barry Watson. And with her memory loss and confusion over her identity, she can’t even hold it together well enough to attend an AA meeting once she discovers that on top of everything else, she's also an alcoholic.

In fact, her lemon square-meltdown scene at the AA meeting was really what convinced me this show would work as a series. The retrograde amnesia is going to be able to drive the story only so far before it runs sputtering out of gas. It’s not a laugh riot and honestly there’s nothing here we hadn’t seen in Goldie Hawn’s movie “Overboard” two decades ago.

But the question of identity – whether a person can change if they give themselves the chance to – seems like something a capable sitcom writer can get some traction out of, and this seems like a sufficiently talented cast to keep me tuning in.

Features Editor Terry J. Aman compiles the Best Bets for The Minot Daily News.

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