A Minute with Stan Hooper

i have watched both episodes and it does bear a strange resemblance to "Newhart". A sane married couple from NY moving to a small town with eccentric people. Hopefully they could develop it long enough to make it lasting. Norm Macdonald is a great talent and I'd love to see him have a remembered show.

this was not what i was expecting, i (and many like me) was hoping for more wise cracking, revenge plotting, evil scheming, nuisance making shenanigans. i was waiting for norm to be... well, norm. it never happened.

for those of you not familiar with "the norm show" i can see this having some appealing quality's, the quaint little family comedy almost, though maybe don't watch it with your 8 yr old.

but for those of us who have known and loved him at his best it simply seems too flat. Too many morals and too many "good" things, make this the opposite of what has made norm a living legend

Stan Hooper (Norm MacDonald) does a minute of TV every week which is one of the most popular minute around. He is the everyman filming it out of a Manhattan studio. He decides to move to Waterford Falls, Wisconsin with his wife Molly (Penelope Ann Miller) to be with the real Americans. There are the Petersons who run the local diner whom he initially assumed to be brothers. Ryan Hawkins is eager to be his cameraman. Chelsea is his girlfriend. Fred Hawkins (Fred Willard) is unhappy that his son Ryan is leaving the family's local cheese conglomerate. Stan rents a home cheap and finds it comes with Gary Jamison as its butler.

This has some funny quirky bits and characters but it also suffers from some awkward stuff. The butler is a ridiculous idea. He would have worked better as a handyman. Also how could he move across the country without a home to go to? The Peterson reveal in the pilot worked to some extend but it would have worked infinitely better if the town is set up as a Norman Rockwell construct. It's fine to play with that construct but there is something awkward about what this show is trying to do. It's too silly in a way that is laughing at the town. The laughs should be directed at Norm who doesn't understand the genius of their small town ways. Norm is not necessarily an everyman type. There is plenty of comedic firepower but the laughs are complicated.

"The Norm Show" was one of the funniest sitcoms ever. Now "A Minute With Stan Hooper" looks like a worthy follow-up. I've only seen the pilot; which was funny as few pilots are.

The coming attractions look like Max Wright will be the Mayor next week. Hopefully it will be an ongoing role.

Now that he's in a good time slot, the show should do well.

I just watched the first episode of the new Norm MacDonald comedy, "A Minute With Stan Hooper," and I thought it was one of the funniest things I've ever seen on TV! Maybe it's just me, but this is "Newhart" with a Norm MacDonald twist. A good cast too -- veteran comics.

There were a lot of surprises -- not just the standard stale jokes that most sitcoms use. Norm MacDonald, as usual, deadpans his way to laughter. Definitely worth watching!