Poor
Dan Gregor and Doug Mand. They most have been bullied mercilessly in high
school, because, Sweet Georgia Brown, do they ever take it out on the protag of
their latest mystery-comedy. During high school, Billy Green was the “King of
Valley Stream,” but in Vegas, he is the loser who cleans out the bathrooms of a
high-end club. A series of Job-like humiliations will rain down on him when he
comes home for Thanksgiving, but he also thinks he kind of-sort of witnessed a
murder (or at least the aftermath), before passing out drunk and stoned in
Gregor’s Most Likely to Murder (trailer here), which is now
available via VOD.
Green
has come home hoping to pick up where he left off, as the bullying crapheel who
could get any girl in his class. Unfortunately, everyone has moved on, except maybe
his best friend Duane. His biggest disappointment comes from Kara, his
ex-girlfriend, who is so over him. To add a further layer of insult, she is now
seeing Lowell Shapiro, Green’s nebbish neighbor, whom he cruelly tormented during
high school.
However,
Green notices Shapiro acting strangely sometime in the early A.M., before he
face-plants for the night. The next day, he wakes to the sirens coming for the
body of Shapiro’s now deceased mother. Immediately suspicious, Green starts
clumsily digging up information on the Shapiros, discovering the old lady was
quite the burden to her son. Of course, nobody wants to hear it, except Duane.
Kara is suitably appalled, but Green is not about to back down.
It
is hard to say whether Most Likely is
a comedy or a cry for help. This is no joke—if Gregor and Mand are still
carrying around toxic emotional baggage from high school, they should reach out
(for what its worth, this is what comes up when you google “mental health hotline”). Regardless, the way they use Green as their whipping boy is
moderately amusing for a while, in a superficial kind of way, but it just gets
uncomfortably awkward after twenty minutes or so.
In
case we missed the point, Adam Pally’s manic sad sack performance as Green will
inspire endless derivations of the word “cringe.” However, Rachel Bloom is
appealingly forceful and cutting as Kara (evidently, she doesn’t get a last name).
It is also amusing to see a mini-Benson reunion
with Didi Conn and Ethan Phillips, who appears as Green’s naïve parents. To his
credit, John Phillips scratches out some chuckles as Perkins, the cop who was
once the butt of Green’s many practical jokes, but Mand might even be harder to
watch than Pally as the desperate approval-seeking Duane.
