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"OK, let&amp;#x27;s talk about ABC&amp;#x27;s new show Mixology. You probably already know this based on a) watching it or b) having caught one of the zillion promos that aired during The Bachelor, but the concept is: the stories of 10 singles at one bar, over the course of one night. I went into Mixology optimistic, if only because I preferred those promos to the incessant ones for Mindgames, a show that I believe was born when Christian Slater and Steve Zahn ran into each other at a gas station, realized they both had the afternoon free, and just started rolling tape. I took care not to look at reviews from NPR and Vulture that, I could tell by the tweeted headlines, were none too impressed. By the time I was finished watching episode one, I had a strong feeling I knew what those reviews were most incensed about. But before we get to Mixology&amp;#x27;s most glaring problem, let me assess the rest of it. The cast: It&amp;#x27;s mostly young comedic actors you&amp;#x27;ll recognize from their parts here and there&amp;amp;#8212;the most prominent of the bunch is Glee&amp;#x27;s Vanessa Lengies. The concept: Sure, it&amp;#x27;s a little hacky, but I tried to look at it as a warmup for the many, many romantic-comedy series in the works for this fall. The comedy: Eh, it&amp;#x27;s fine. Pass-the-time-while-on-your-laptop-fine, so that you don&amp;#x27;t notice that for two scenes in a row, several minutes apart, Lengies&amp;#x27; bartender love interest is poring over the schedule board in the back. (They couldn&amp;#x27;t think of anything else to do with him?) It&amp;#x27;s a nonthreatening, ain&amp;#x27;t-gonna-hurt-nobody brand of fine&amp;amp;#8212;or, at least, it was right up until the misogynistic, slightly rape-y stuff started. And didn&amp;#x27;t stop. This show, and its first episode, comes from the guy duo behind The Hangover&amp;amp;#8212;I&amp;#x27;m sure most of their sex-related humor was toned down for network television. But what they distilled it into&amp;amp;#8212;half a dozen jarring, puzzling, unnecessary anti-woman jokes&amp;amp;#8212;is just kinda weird. None of the lines that fall into this category were even funny enough to risk the debate over whether they were, you know, casually condoning unethical sexual behavior. I&amp;#x27;m talking &amp;quot;smash it out&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;bang her out&amp;quot; references ad nauseam, an openly discussed hunt for the drunkest girls in the bar, and a female character going out of her way to say that Don Draper, &amp;quot;a real man,&amp;quot; would &amp;quot;smack her in the mouth&amp;quot; if she talked back to him. Uh-huh. I can just hear the writers&amp;#x27; room defense for this: This is how guys talk when no one&amp;#x27;s around! This is how this particular guy-like girl (whom we hear referred to as &amp;quot;a bitch&amp;quot; more times than we hear her name in the episode) talks when no one&amp;#x27;s around! And we want to be real. So, so real. This is a response I&amp;#x27;ve stopped buying when it&amp;#x27;s employed to justify discriminatory humor. How many times have you watched a universally beloved sitcom&amp;amp;#8212;Seinfeld, for example&amp;amp;#8212;and thought, Gee, I&amp;#x27;d be so much more into this show if Jerry and George&amp;#x27;s sex talks were just a little more authentic. They never call women stupid bitches or celebrate finding a girl on the brink of alcohol poisoning! Truly funny writers don&amp;#x27;t need to go down this path&amp;amp;#8212;and most of the men (or women) I know wouldn&amp;#x27;t want to be represented by whomever&amp;#x27;s actually laughing at this stuff. If one of my male friends preyed on a super-intoxicated girl at a bar, while loudly narrating the whole thing, it would be something the rest of my male friends talked about the next morning. And not in a high-five kinda way. Plus: Wait, do these guys not want us to watch this show? Who puts a potentially offensive joke, let alone half a dozen such turn-offs, in their first-impression outing? It&amp;#x27;s almost like the producers are out to sink their own battleship. In any case, they took a risk weaving all this eyebrow-raising material into the pilot&amp;amp;#8212;and that risk was not well calculated. There simply isn&amp;#x27;t enough dynamic stuff going on here to make anybody look past so many pounding-out jokes, the women end up looking like so many orders of veal parm. Veal parms who respect Don Draper&amp;#x27;s right to clock them as he sees fit."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/entertainment/blogs/obsessed/2014/02/mixology-review>