Trial & Error (2017)

Unhinged at times, oddly thoughtful at others, Trial and Error is more than parody; it’s a welcome wave of silliness.

Chenoweth delivers one of her best performances as Lavinia. ... Between its bright color palette, sunny setting and jaunty tone, Trial is a perfect complement for a glass of lemonade and a midsummer heat wave.

It takes a tremendous amount of commitment and precision to make comedy this stupid work so brilliantly, and once again Trial & Error’s cast proves wonderfully capable.

Call me crude, immature, and jejune—editors do, all the time—but I cannot help but feel a certain fondness for a show in which characters have names like Judge Horsedich. And any comedy casting Shepherd deserves special recognition.

Under normal circumstances, this wouldn’t be funny. But there’s a lot talented people hard at work on this show making sure that Trial & Error is presenting nothing that resembles “normal circumstances.”

The humor is a combination of sight gags, slapstick and wordplay. And, again, nobody does it better than Lithgow in all three phases.

It's silly and sometimes slapstick, but it works. And what makes it work is that Lithgow is so good as the alleged murderer.

Consistently funny and with surprisingly engaging twists for a comedy, Trial & Error commits few errors through its first three episodes.

Trial & Error has the kind of good bones and fool-proof premise that could make for a great, long-running sitcom (the plan is to debut a new crime every season). The performances are mostly wonderful--you won’t find me bad-mouthing Lithgow--and the already-tiring true-crime genre was due for a good zinging. It got one.

It’s frequently possible to see the jokes in Trial & Error coming from a mile away, but the commitment of the performers somehow makes even the silliest punchlines very funny.