NBC’s ‘Go On’ review: Who’s afraid of ghosts?

Back when “Go On” and “The New Normal” were starting off their respective seasons, we were firmly in the camp that Matthew Perry had the superior show here. The pilot episode was funny, charming, and also a little bit moving, and having a sitcom deal with something like mourning almost has a “Patch Adams” sort of feel to it.

Now that we are several episodes in, however, we are starting to realize that this show may suffer from a classic problem with some comedies: a strong pitch does not alone make a good show. It feels at times that the writers are a little bit stuck in a rut when it came to what to do moving forward, and with that in find, it felt like we were watching the same thing every week. Now that the show has been given a full-season order, we have to hope that it will start to come up with some more ideas.

Thankfully, Tuesday night’s edition was at least a step in the right direction, even if it is not showing off the same sort of creativity that “The New Normal” is at the moment. There were still some repeat plots that played out again and again, but at least we had a pretty interesting story about Perry’s Ryan starting to see a ghost of his wife Janie. At first, we didn’t know if we liked this or not; it actually did start to remind us of “Monk,” when Adrian would interact with Trudy in his attempts to move forward. We also really enjoyed the idea of Ryan watching another guy go grocery shopping just so that he would figure out how to do it properly, mostly because we could see this happening in a more subtle way in real life.

Really, the biggest problem holding “Go On” back at the moment is that the “wacky other group members” are not being developed enough. We do want them to have quirks, but we want to see more of the people who they are underneath their one-liners. Part of the problem here, though, may simply be that there are so many of them, and we haven’t had a chance to meet all of them just yet.

Really, we’re not sold on “Go On” being the best comedy of the season anymore, but it is still an enjoyable show that only seems to be suffering from playing it a little safe at the moment. What do you think?