COMEDY
Nate (Josh Cooke) is a neurotic genius who lives like a pack rat and deliberately wastes his potential by working in a record store. Marni (Jennifer Finnigan) is so giddily outgoing that she tells sordid family secrets just to hear herself talk.
They're so weird they've got to fall for each other. That's the premise of this sitcom, which revels in eccentricity but infrequently makes it funny. Everyone tries so hard to be offbeat in the Jan. 4 premiere that the show grows monotonous.
Nate could have lifted his occupation from the film High Fidelity, and the hostility between him and Marni's disabled friend Todd (Ron Reaco Lee) seems like something out of Curb Your Enthusiasm. But one element of Committed was new to me: the "dying clown" (deadpan Tom Poston) living in the closet of Marni's New York apartment under the terms of her sublease. "He's a clown, he's dying—it's not that interesting a story," Marni says to Nate. Sadly, she's right.
