‘The Great Indoors’ Lacks the Adventure it Promises

“The Great Indoors,” Mike Gibbons’s new sitcom TV series on CBS, aired its pilot episode on Oct. 27. The show has some stars in its cast, and it manages a few good laughs, but does it bring anything new to the table? Probably not.

The show revolves around the office workplace of an outdoor magazine. Jack Gordon (Joel McHale) is the magazine’s rough and tough lone-wolf outdoors reporter who has dealt with grizzlies but is completely inept at dealing with modern tech (Are smartphones really that modern anymore?). The magazine’s founder, Roland (Stephen Fry), decides to downsize the establishment and, in a Newsweek move, go completely online. Jack’s outdoor explorations come to an end as he is asked to lead the team in the office under Roland’s daughter, Brooke, his ex-girlfriend. The show explores the dynamics of the relationship between techy, selfie-obsessed millennials and an old school, fax-machine-using reporter.

The show recycles the stereotypical representations of the “new” and “old” generations and their struggles in working with each other. Such representations would have been fine had the show brought some interesting twist to this overused narrative. As things stand, the stereotypes are fairly exaggerated and tend towards the predictable. While the millennials gawk at the fact that Jack does not have an Instagram, Jack repeatedly tells them to get off their screens and to stop recording everything. Jack really isn’t as old as the grandpa character into which he’s been made, and the millennials are all caricatures. There are some funny moments, but it all comes back to what the show is adding a narrative that we’ve already grown used to—and each time the answer is “not much.”

The one attribute that still makes the show appealing is the cast. With Stephen Fry and Joel McHale in the credits, it’s hard to not give the show a chance, but it is easy to be left wondering what potential Fry and McHale saw in the storyline. Fry adds his characteristic sophisticated humor at intervals, and his lines are probably the highlight of the show. One does wonder, however, why the man who has worked in classics like “Jeeves and Wooster” made the choice to link his name to “The Great Indoors.”

It seems evident that the show will not contribute much to the Gen-X vs Millennials debate, which leaves us wondering how long the show will go on at all. It will probably become clear by the next few episodes if the show will continue to make fun of pagers and “these stupid selfie sticks” or if it will offer something new. So if it’s a Saturday night, you have nowhere to be, and you’ve been wondering what Stephen Fry is up to these days, then with a pinch of salt (or several), give “The Great Indoors” a shot.