'DMV' Desperately Needs to Abandon Its Will They/Won't They

I had not high hopes for the sitcom DMV (it is on CBS, after all), but I did have some hope, based mostly on the cast, which includes one of my favorites, Harriet Dyer (Colin from Accounts), scene-stealing aficionado Tim Meadows, SNL‘er Molly Kearney, and The Righteous Gemstones Tony Cavalero, who is surprisingly not Theo Von. It’s been underwhelming, to say the least.

Unhappy, overworked, underappreciated employees of the biggest public-facing bureaucratic nightmare in American society should be ripe for comedy. If Greg Daniels and Mike Schur can set two of the century’s greatest comedies in a company that sells paper and a Parks and Recreation office, imagine the possibilities for the DMV.

But DMV has spent most of its first seven episodes ignoring the DMV in favor of a potential romantic pairing between two people with zero chemistry: Colette (Dyer) and the handsome doofus Noa (Alex Tarrant). A Jim-and-Pam possibility this is not. This isn’t about stolen glances or flirting around the vending machine; it’s about a very insecure woman desperately trying to make herself appealing to someone who has no romantic interest in her.

And it’s not a minor storyline — it’s practically the entire show. In the pilot, Colette humiliates herself in front of Noa by getting stuck in a bathroom window while attempting to escape to avoid … humiliating herself in front of Noa. In the second episode, she tries to make the DMV an appealing workplace so Noa won’t quit. In the third, she can’t bring herself to fail him on his driving test — despite his terrible driving — because she has a crush. In the fourth, she pretends to be married to a coworker so a former classmate won’t think she actually works at the DMV, but she doesn’t want Noa to know. In the fifth, Colette tries to prove she’s selflessly charitable by giving Noa a gift without taking credit for it, and in the sixth, she resorts to voodoo magic in hopes that Noa will reciprocate the crush.

The romantic possibilities are hopeless, and the comedy in watching Colette throw herself at this doofus week after week has been completely drained. We get it: she’s obsessed and willing, over and over, to debase herself in pursuit of a himbo.

But what about the potential inherent in the drudgery of the job? Abbott Elementary set an episode in a DMV this season that was strikingly better than any episode of DMV. Only in this week’s episode did the show finally set aside the crush long enough to play in the DMV sandbox: centering a storyline on Colette kissing up to the boss so they could use bonus funding to buy a coffee maker, and on Tim Meadows’ character unwittingly befriending a customer-service AI after repeatedly running into bureaucratic obstacles while trying to secure a new office chair. That’s the stuff. It still wasn’t a great episode, but at least it took better advantage of its setting instead of putting Colette through the wringer in service of a will-they/won’t-they that never should.