If you happen to’re going to middle a sitcom on a personality who, post-divorce, is the third-richest girl in America, casting Maya Rudolph is a brilliant transfer.
Molly Novak, the heroine of the brand new Apple TV+ sequence “Loot,” is a tech gazillionaire’s soon-to-be-ex spouse who’s form and humorous and, as performed by Rudolph, childishly delighted by her lavish life-style. Rudolph’s seamless mix of wisecracking bravado and unassuming appeal — amongst up to date actresses, she’s the simplest to think about in a Nineteen Thirties Hollywood comedy — retains us on Molly’s aspect as she overhauls her life and her attitudes throughout 10 episodes.
For a type of episodes, it’s simple to be on the aspect of “Loot,” too. The present opens with Molly en path to the outsized yacht that her husband, John (Adam Scott), is giving her for her forty fifth birthday. “Can we flip the solar down, like, 20 %?” she asks, half critically, concurrently mocking and celebrating their megarich standing.
The caricature of maximum wealth is, within the first episode, unrelenting and fairly humorous, from Seal’s visitor look to sing “Blissful Birthday” (he’s upset to study that Michael Bolton sang it at one in all Molly’s earlier birthdays) to Molly’s awkward makes an attempt to open the doorways of John’s candy-colored, aerodynamic sports activities vehicles. That screwball power resurfaces right here and there later within the sequence, notably in a working gag that includes David Chang as Molly’s private chef, consistently apologizing that his eating places take his consideration away from her.
That first half-hour is motion packed: Molly and John’s marriage predictably implodes; Molly emerges from their divorce with $87 billion and goes on a transcontinental partying jag; lastly, again in Los Angeles and feeling misplaced, she will get a cellphone name from the director of the charitable basis she didn’t know she had and decides to test it out.
After which “Loot,” for probably the most half, goes off a cliff, the pleasures of the primary episode feeling an increasing number of just like the setup for a joke that by no means arrives. Satire takes a vacation, changed by drained office comedy, unconvincing romantic comedy and a degree of sentimentality that’s past even what the present’s creators, Alan Yang and Matt Hubbard, may have gotten away with after they labored on “Parks and Recreation.”
A few of this may be blamed on the final pablum-for-the-pandemic impact that has gripped scenario comedy for the previous few years. However the issues with “Loot” transcend that. It’s comprehensible that the present needs to make Molly as sympathetic as potential, however it presents her with hardly any battle in any respect past her personal comedian weaknesses; Scott, whose plastered-on smarm is ideal for John, hardly exhibits up after the opening.
You possibly can really feel a juggling act happening: The present needs to mock Molly’s privileged cluelessness after which additionally, as her work with the muse reorients her ethical compass (or just shames her), to attain factors for reforming her and for providing facile reflections on class and gender. Its try and make that straddle is halfhearted, nevertheless — one indication of the present’s divided consciousness is the unusual method during which nobody feedback on Molly’s wealth, or acts unusually round her, except there’s a specific message being delivered.
More often than not is taken up by the mildly amusing, limply formulaic excessive jinks of the muse employees, who embody the forbidding director, Sofia (Michaela Jaé Rodriguez of “Pose”), a sweetheart of a tech man (Ron Funches) and a normie accountant with a crush on Molly (Nat Faxon). They’re all superb, and Joel Kim Booster, as Molly’s private assistant, might be bitingly humorous when the script provides him an opportunity. However their roles are so softly drawn that their performances don’t have an opportunity to register.
Rudolph, in the meantime, sails via “Loot” just like the captain of Molly’s gigantic yacht, oblivious to the tough waters. The present is structured as a sequence of epiphanies, as Molly takes her journey of self-discovery and learns how the little individuals suppose; Rudolph, together with her terribly expressive options, makes us really feel each new revelation. She will be able to’t make us overlook, although, that the primary episode’s depiction of the fakery of privilege is the one actual factor within the present.