Malcolm Gladwell once defined the quality of stickiness as “the quality that a message needs to be successful.” It is the thing that makes the content exciting and, if you’re watching a TV show, the thing that makes you want to watch it again next week. “Dr. Ken,” a new ABC sitcom starring Ken Jeong that is based on his life, is funny but far from sticky.
Jeong stars as Dr. Ken Park, a man who has to deal with issues both at work and with his family. For example, in the pilot he needs to learn to trust his teenage daughter.
Before this show I had primarily known Jeong as the man who played the incredibly unhinged Ben Chang on “Community.” I thought it would be hard to believe his portrayal of a very competent family man, but I was wrong. Jeong is an excellent actor and brings a lot of energy to the part.
There were times when I thought Jeong’s character was over the top. He has a tendency to support his jokes with exaggerated motions, and that strategy doesn’t always work.
I also thought there was too much focus on Jeong’s character. While he is the lead, most sitcoms have stories that focus on supporting characters. Both stories in this episode focused on Dr. Park.
The best sitcoms — like “Cheers” or “30 Rock” — are about communities and use their supporting casts well. The supporting cast in this show is good — I particularly liked Suzy Nakamura and Kate Simses as Dr. Park’s wife and co-worker, respectively — but I feel like they could be utilized better.
“Dr. Ken” is shot in a multi-camera format, which does it no favors. Single camera sitcoms do not have laugh tracks, which can prevent a sitcom from moving forward from a bombed joke. There are a number of jokes that fall flat in this episode, like in every sitcom pilot, but its laugh track tends to accentuate how unfunny those jokes are.
Jeong posted on Twitter that he intended the show’s embrace of normal multi-cam sitcom tropes to be somewhat revolutionary when applied to an Asian-American family. It is nice to see a sitcom about an Asian-American family that doesn’t rely on race for the vast majority of its humor.
There is a fine line between adopting conventions to subvert them subtly and adopting the blandness of those conventions in such a manner that it overwhelms the subversion. “Dr. Ken” has not yet learned how to walk that line, but when it does it will be much “stickier.”
