Thursday nights at 9:00 PM are now on my tv schedule once again. When I watched the pilot of The Crazy Ones, I generally expected to see Robin Williams doing his infamous slapstick comedy and Sarah Michelle Gellar playing the straight woman to Williams. Yes, in essence, that is what I saw, but The Crazy Ones has a lot of heart I wasn’t expecting to see in a half hour show.

The Crazy Ones began with the expected father/daughter drama of two very different people working together, but it’s quickly added to by the rest of the cast. James Wolk, in particular, is great as protegé Zach Cropper to Williams’ character Simon Roberts. Similarly, the play-by-plays between Gellar’s character Sydney Roberts and her assistant Lauren (Amanda Setton) are an absolute delight to watch, especially when Lauren is being warned not to laugh at Simon’s goofball antics.

Photo credit: Cliff Lipson

The premise of the pilot (which is available for free download from iTunes) is that McDonalds wants to fire the ad agency from their current campaign, so Simon bites off a little more than he can chew and promises to get a big name attached to the campaign in order to prevent losing the client. His attempts to garner Kelly Clarkson (in an awesome guest appearance) for the campaign, but things quickly go wrong. Clarkson wants to change her image, and the jingle she agrees to sing for McDonalds is very racy and inappropriate for a fast food chain. When Simon and Zach attempt to gently steer her towards a more appropriate song choice, Clarkson storms out while everyone else looks on. In the end, Sydney ends up saving the day, which leads to a beautiful father/daughter moment and the promise of more to come in following weeks.

I actually watched the show with my father, and though there were several moments that we both groaned at, we also found ourselves laughing helplessly at many more. The show also had very good ratings, with a 4.0 in the key 18-49 demographic.

The Crazy Ones is a good show with a lot of promise, and I can’t wait to see what happens next Thursday at 9 PM.