What to Binge This Weekend: Do 'Trust the B---- in Apartment 23' to Make You Laugh a Whole Lot
It’s a sad reality of network television that when the title of your show has to be bleeped, you probably aren’t long for this world. That was true of CBS’s $#*! My Dad Says and, more tragically, ABC’s Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23, which managed to hang on for two seasons before getting drop-kicked off the airwaves. But it leaves behind a legacy of being one of the funniest cult comedies of this young decade, not to mention one of the great recent New York-set sitcoms.
Created by Nahnatchka Khan, who is currently enjoying a happier experience with ABC thanks to her freshman year success story, Fresh Off the Boat, Don’t Trust the B---- was designed as a showcase for Krysten Ritter, a scene-stealing “that girl” whose previous credits included memorable appearances on Gilmore Girls and Breaking Bad. Combining a cutting glare with silver-tongued sarcasm, Ritter is a force of nature on the show, which finds her bon vivant bitch, Chloe, bedeviling her unsuspecting new roommate June (Dreama Walker), newly arrived in Manhattan from Indiana. Midwestern nice inevitably clashes with New York attitude and a classic love/hate relationship is born.
The Chloe and June relationship is front and center obviously, but Khan also made sure that their world expanded outwards in strange, delightful ways. One of her masterstrokes was hiring James Van Der Beek to play a heightened version of himself (a la Neil Patrick Harris in the Harold & Kumar film franchise), one who has a history with Chloe, and the Beek commits to the gag with gusto. In what may be the show’s best episode (certainly Top 5, anyway), the duo stage a takeover of People magazine in order to put James in contention for the annual “Sexiest Man Alive” cover. And Van Der Beek wasn’t the only celebrity who spoofed themselves during the show’s run; Busy Phillipps, Frankie Muniz, and Dean Cain all got in on the self-aware self-mocking action.
What wasn’t so amusing was ABC’s treatment of the series. The network decided to air only seven of the 13 produced first-season episodes, saving the remaining six for the sophomore year. But when the show returned, ABC basically programmed the new and old episodes alike by throwing them up in the air and putting them on the air as they landed. That threw off Khan’s modest attempts at serialized storytelling, which understandably made it difficult for viewers to keep tuning in when the basic continuity, not to mention the characters’ relationships to each other, seemed to be changing on a week-to-week basis. (Eventually, the network gave up altogether, pulling the series off the air with eight unaired episodes in storage.) Fortunately, Don’t Trust the B---- is preserved in its intended order on Netflix, where profanity is always welcome, both in the show as well as the title. To which we say… f--k yeah!
All 26 episodes of Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 are available on Netflix.
