‘No Tomorrow’: Rom-Comming the Apocalypse
It takes a certain amount of adroitness to pull off a weekly romantic comedy on television. The genre seems to work best in feature films, in which a couple can meet, fall in love, and either settle into domesticity or suffer a tragic end in just under two hours. On TV, the relationship has to be nudged along at a steady-but-not-too-rapid pace, and once the twosome becomes a real couple, the show becomes less about the romance and more about the comedy. Unless, of course, the producers’ endgame is the end of the world.
So it is with No Tomorrow, a new show that cleverly extends the CW’s impressive run of novel rom-coms such as Jane the Virgin and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. No Tomorrow stars Tori Anderson as Evie Callahan, the type of personality who’s a list-maker and a risk-avoider. She meets Joshua Sasse’s Xavier Holliday, who signals his free-spirit qualifications by wearing a dorky necklace, a man bun, and one of those irritating I-haven’t-washed-my-hair hood-hats that was rightly ridiculed just last week on the second episode of This Is Us.
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It’s kismet, right? Yeah, pretty much. They’re made for each other: She’s the kind of chipper enthusiast who says things like “Holy smokes!,” and he’s the kind of guy who thinks the world is going to end in a little over eight months and is keeping his version of a bucket list, which he calls an “apocalyst.” (Naturally, it’s written in a little Moleskine notebook.)
To get involved in No Tomorrow, you have to buy into the idea that Evie will buy into the idea that the world is going to end so soon after meeting a guy who’s hot but, let’s face it, might be a paranoid nutcase as well. The premiere makes a convincing case for this premise with greater ease than I would have thought possible. The show is going to turn off that portion of the viewing audience that thinks global warming is a hoax — that’s the reason, Xavier says, we’re all gonna die — but I doubt there’s much overlap between climate-change-deniers and the CW demo anyway. Sasse and Anderson are pretty charming, and I’m curious to see if the show can sustain its premise into a second week. After that, according to its own self-imposed rules, the show can’t last more than eight months before we all burn up.
No Tomorrow airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on the CW.
