Does Best Time Ever With Neil Patrick Harris Live Up To Its Title?

What Is This Thing?

Many decades after variety shows had their heyday, Neil Patrick Harris tries to revive the genre for a new generation. So it's actually a bunch of different things strung together over the course of an hour of live TV: pranks, games, hidden-camera business, a physical challenge, and a celebrity guest.

When Is It On?

Tuesday at 10 PM on NBC for one more week; starting September 29, it moves to 8 PM.

Why Was It Made Now?

Someone at NBC really wants to bring back the variety show -- it already tried last year with Maya Rudolph -- and now that Harris has hosted both the Tonys and the Oscars, there may be no more likely choice to headline such a thing.

What's Its Pedigree?

Based on the British variety series Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway, Best Time Ever pairs the aforementioned Harris, host extraordinaire, with veteran live TV director Glenn Weiss (Peter Pan Live!, some Tonys, some Emmys, some Survivor finales, etc. -- really a lot of that kind of thing).

...And?

In case you've somehow missed spotting Harris in any of the 500 different projects he's starred in since How I Met Your Mother ended, you might be reassured to see that he can still really wear a suit. It was also very gracious of him to let his actor husband show up to sit in the audience -- right across the aisle from Perez Hilton, no less!

...But?

As I wrote in the above-linked post about The Maya Rudolph Show, I don't really get the variety show as a genre, so admittedly, this was never going to be for me. But I really, honestly, don't know whom it is for. Each segment was unwatchable in a completely different way than the one that came before, and by the time I reached the end, my confusion gave way to offense at how recklessly my time had been wasted.

When you hear the term "variety show," your mind probably goes to Sonny & Cher or the Osmonds or even Hee Haw. You're expecting a mix of musical performances and comedy sketches, and while you aren't necessarily counting on the "comedy" to be especially hilarious, you count on it at least to have an idea behind it. And if the sketches are unlikely to work, at least a real musician could be expected to do a competent rendition of his or her own song. But this variety show doesn't feature either of those variety-show staples! TALK ABOUT OUTSIDE THE BOX!!!

We start with an opening credits sequence dripping with the perspiration from Harris straining to show us all his talents -- and, alarmingly, a little kid wearing a miniature version of Harris's suit and labeled "Little NPH."

The credits close with the news that tonight's special celebrity announcer is Reese Witherspoon, someone you'd never know was Harris's Executive Producer on Gone Girl because every time the camera cuts to her, it's so she can deliver a dumb blonde punchline.

From there, instead of having anyone deliver any kind of performance, Harris goes straight into the crowd to announce some facts his poor PAs have collected about his audience members. That the first of these is a woman who apparently told a stranger that she minimizes the number of bathroom breaks her family takes on road trips by using a child's portable potty in the car is a pretty solid warning of the shiteous material yet to come.

But this hygiene-challenged mom isn't the focus of the segment: that "honour" belongs to Oronde and Teresha Hamilton, a couple who are about to learn, on live TV, how badly their privacy has been violated for the past several months of their lives. Harris was the porter who helped them with their bags when they checked in at the Plaza! Harris was in a mascot costume at an Alabama football game they attended! HARRIS PHOTOBOMBED SOME OF THE PHOTOS AT THEIR WEDDING and also BROKE INTO THEIR WEDDING-NIGHT HOTEL ROOM TO FLOP ON THE BED AND THEN SPRINKLE IT WITH ROSE PETALS!

After stiffly sitting through this "hilarious" intrusion into arguably the most important day of their lives, the Hamiltons are rewarded with a honeymoon trip to Antigua, a destination possibly chosen just to set up Witherspoon for a ditzy "joke" premised on the notion that she thinks that's where antiques come from.

Next: Cross Country Karaoke Party. After being informed that Harris's Chrissy Teigen will be Nicole Scherzinger, whom he's weirdly flirty with given that his HUSBAND is right there in the audience, out comes Gloria Gaynor to perform her hit, "I Will Survive," sort of. "But you said there would be no musical performances!" I did, and that's because I don't think it counts if the singer only gets to sing a few lines at a time. See, for this one, the show has installed hidden cameras in several viewers' homes so that Harris can cut to them live and give them a chance to complete the verse Gaynor's stopped on. Two segments in a row that rely on the show's willingness to impose itself on regular people?

@TaraAriano nah this whole thing is an NSA plot designed to make us hate privacy

— David Sims (@davidlsims) September 16, 2015

Getting to look inside the homes of non-famous people who had no idea this was about to happen to them also gives Harris the opportunity to shit on their décor. "You didn't win and we can't put any art on your walls," he tells the first; "Fantastic, you can get a smaller house" is his slam for the second. Harris was already smug enough to this point; mocking normals and their modest means on top of everything else does not make him look great.

At the end of this segment, we learn that every episode will find Harris facing off in a contest of some sort against either the episode's special announcer, Scherzinger, a normal from the audience, or a mystery guest. This time, Witherspoon ends up getting the call to oppose Harris in some kind of climbing/ziplining BS that's a not-especially-clever commercial for NBC's own American Ninja Warrior, but we still find out the identity of the mystery guest who was on hand for the bit.

Someone gives you a TV show and you decide to involve Carrot Top in the first episode is this a good decision y/n

— Adam Sternbergh (@sternbergh) September 16, 2015

There's a comedy quiz where a lady wins a car -- on a multiple choice trivia game, she wins a car -- and a dumb bit where a barely disguised Harris pretends to be Jurgen, the host of the Austrian version of The Voice, to prank that show's judges and host.

There is literally nothing cooler than celebrities pranking other celebrities. It's so nice that they let us average people watch them do it

— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) September 16, 2015

How will Harris & Co. possibly cap off this hour of wonders? With...whatever this is.

I still don't know what the point was of Little NPH, but knowing that several adults that boy trusts made him put on a tiny suit and sunglasses and lip-sync to Pitbull makes me hope he pursues legal emancipation as soon as he possibly can.

This closing number is the show in microcosm, a chaotic assault on the senses totally bereft of balance, flow, logic, or any kind of artistic point of view. It does, however, sort of answer the question of whom the show is for: people who wish the experience of watching a TV show were more like standing in the middle of a casino floor or carnival midway.

You guys. It's so bad.

...So?

"Oh shit, it sounds so bad, I have got to see this!" I get that you might think you do? But I'm telling you as a friend: please don't.