The Great Indoors

Joel McHale sporting the same beard from his final season (and hopefully a movie) of Community and the great Stephen Fry are the two best reasons to watch out for this series in the coming weeks.......Being a guy born in the early 1990's I have always been thrown between the need to identify myself either as a Millennial or to be a part of the Gen X....So this series is perfect for me but for others looking solely for comic relief it still hasn't reached its stride yet....The characters are your basic stereotypes with modern influences so no one really stands out....But its refreshing to have a varied cast of people portraying these characters.....Also the female lead seems to be just a pretty face.....With just 2 episodes in no one can predict this series's fate but we can all recognize its potential...Hope the creators use the talent at hand well...P.S. This series at least has some hope when compared to other CBS duds this season....

It's funny to read the reviews that take this series to task for its depiction of Millennials. And those who think the show belittles Gen-Xers. In reality, I think it does disservice to both groups, first by trying to define every character by one of those two groups, promoting stereotypes.

Almost all of the "humor" in this show stems from the generational skirmishes that occur between the two camps--the Gen-X lead character (Joel McHale) and the Millennials who staff the digital magazine. The comedy is treated like a zero-sum proposition, where one side can only gain laughs at the expense of the other.

Frankly, I think the Millennials take a worse comic beating, but that may just be my personal perspective. These "journalists" seem to know almost nothing about the subject of the magazine, journalistic methods, or even how to relate to readers (or anyone else).

At its core, I think the show should be judged, in part, by how funny it is, i.e. how many laughs it generates. And the first two episodes did not elicit many. There was a brief scene involving a bear cub that managed to feel real and connected to actual feelings (though it was nearly undermined by some weak jokes about the three-second attention spans of the Millennials). Maybe the show will have to reach for more of those moments and fewer laughs to be watchable.

Sick of stupid "10 things to do" listicles? Want to hit thos special unicorn millenials with their stupid selfiesticks every time you see them? Have you actually been out of your house recently?

Then this might be just the sitcom, you have been waiting for!

The great Indoors is an entertaining clash of the generations sitcom, dragging out every cliché there is about young and old people and lets them struggle through everyday life working at an outdoor magazine... indoors.

If you're easily upset, like most of the current generation is, this might not be the one for you. But grab you participation award at the door anyways.

There are certain comedic concepts that lazy joke writers love. These involve things like mothers-in-law warring with daughters-in-law or residents of Alabama trailer parks marrying their sisters. They require no cleverness or originality, just a knowledge of how such jokes are structured and the ability to recall previous jokes and change them around a little.

The Great Indoors is a show that always goes for the easy, obvious laugh. It's the sort of show that, even when you do laugh - which happens rarely - you don't enjoy the laugh that much, because you've already laughed at that joke hundreds of times before.

The premise is simple. A macho, outdoorsy writer is forced to take an office job amongst callow millennials. He teaches them something about "real life" and they teach himself about the "modern world."

The first thing I find odd about this series is that the clueless old guy is a Gen-Xer. I know a lot of Gen-Xers, and many live on their iPhones, texting and tweeting and posting selfies on Instagram. I feel the character is more like a Baby Boomer; it would make a lot more sense if the part was played by Robert DeNiro. Although I'm a Baby Boomer and look, I'm using the Internet!

The portrayal of Millenials makes me think of elderly comedians on stage going, "man, these kids today with their podcasts and their hip-hop, what's up with them?" It's as though the series is written by aliens who have simply read some joke books but have never actually met any humans.

This is not to say that there aren't young people are technologically adept but a little clueless, or that there aren't fortysomethings who lives have not intersected much with technology. The problem is not showing such characters, but in acting as though these characters aren't individuals but are rather generational archetypes.

I was ready to give up after one episode, but then I happened to see that a couple of people on the IMDb message board for this series said that episode 2 was so much better. This turned out to be untrue; perhaps it was the writers trying to save their show. If so, they put more work into IMDb than they did in writing their jokes.

Joel McHale tickles me, but miscast as outdoors stud.

Stephen Frye is good. The millennials suck, or blame the gawd-awful writing.

I would laugh a couple times per episode, but not worth the other 28 minutes of pain.