Hopefully One Day 'DMV' Will Be As Good As Its Cast

Midway through the premiere episode of DMV, Colette — played by the brilliant Harriet Dyer (somehow passed over for the Pajiba 10) — asks Gregg, played by Tim Meadows, “Do you have any idea how hard it is to be a single woman in her 30s?” Gregg replies, “Do you have any idea how hard it is to be a Black man in his 60s?” which, fair, but also a weird question for a character played by Tim Meadows to ask since he can’t possibly be a day over 5—wait, what? He’s 64? GTFO.

Meadows, who has somehow aged better than George Clooney (they’re the same age!), and Harriet Dyer are just two of the reasons to give DMV a shot — along with former SNL cast member Molly Kearney, The Righteous Gemstones’ Tony Cavalero, and later in the season, a recurring role for Randall Park.

That said, the pilot doesn’t quite live up to its stellar cast — though the bones of a decent workplace sitcom are here. Everyone works at a DMV, alongside Noa (Alex Tarrant), an attractive new hire whom Colette immediately crushes on, Ceci (Gigi Zumbado), the DMV photographer, and a revolving door of exasperated customers — including Mark Feuerstein as a rich douchebag learning what it’s like to be treated like everyone else.

Mostly, it’s your standard workplace comedy, only with angrier customers and more traffic cones. The jokes are fine, but the final five minutes — in which Colette humiliates herself in front of Noa, gets a maxi pad stuck to her skirt, and wedges herself halfway through a bathroom window — are genuinely hilarious, thanks entirely to Harriet Dyer’s gift for physical comedy.

The series comes from Dana Klein (wife of Mark Feuerstein), a writer from Friends who… hasn’t had a hit since Friends. That’s not for lack of trying — she created Friends with Better Lives, which CBS canceled midway through its first season in 2014, and 9JKL, a 2017 sitcom starring Feuerstein, David Walton, Liza Lapira, Elliott Gould, and Linda Lavin that I swear to God I’ve never heard of until right now.

Hopefully, DMV doesn’t pull a 9JKL — a comedy with a killer cast that vanishes into the network void. The writing will need to sharpen, and the jokes will need to land faster if it hopes to stick around. Still, I’ll be watching every week because I will watch literally anything with Harriet Dyer and/or Randall Park, including too many episodes of The Young Rock and Watson. And I genuinely hope it takes off, because network television could really use a few solid comedies to give us a break from prestige bingeing — and Tim Allen’s Shifting Gears is not the answer.