Jones’ bumpy road from stage to screen
They come from everywhere, the immigrants who find their way to the boroughs of New York City, but they all seem eventually to converge in the person of the extremely talented writer-actor Sarah Jones.
Jones, whose off-Broadway, one-woman show “Bridge & Tunnel” was a critical hit in New York last year -- a Broadway transfer is planned for this fall -- has a gift for not only mimicking dialects and physically evoking a wide variety of characters but also for giving them interesting things to say. Which is why it’s so disappointing to report that “The Sarah Jones Show,” a one-hour television compression of dozens of her characters, including a wannabe male rapper, a Jewish grandmother, a sassy homeless woman and a Baghdad fashionista, fails to fly.
Less than the sum of its parts, the show is billed by Bravo as a “special” but it feels more like a failed pilot. Jones’ various personas are spliced and diced into skits and woman-on-the-street interviews, yielding a fast-paced hour of hit and, more often than not, miss humor. The format is reductive, resulting in caricatures more than characters, and the switch to TV dilutes the effect of Jones’ ability to quickly switch gears with a minor wardrobe change or the addition of a prop.
There are buried nuggets of truth and humor throughout the show but ultimately they are overwhelmed by wan grasps for sitcom-level laughs. Jones’ ability to play men as easily as women and to inhabit numerous ethnicities recalls Tracey Ullman, but what is missing here is the capacity for interaction with others.
The most successful sketch is Jones’ turn as Joey, a macho Italian American cop giving a seminar on political correctness to a group of fellow officers. Her dead-on interpretation of a white man attempting to “relate” is full of bite and precisely observed details.
Less successful are running gags involving Nereida, a Latina from the Bronx, and Sugar St. James, an aspiring British actress. Several times throughout the show, via a “hidden camera,” we witness the clueless Nereida working at a visitor information kiosk in Times Square. It’s difficult to see the point of the exercise as she ridicules tourists from Sweden, Germany and Wales while coming across as little more than a stereotype herself.
Sugar also interacts with apparently real people in an equally pointless series of bits in which she interviews them on how to be more like a “black” American for auditions. It’s not so much that any of these characters are offensive, it’s just that the brief amount of time we spend with them inhibits our ability to relate to them as more than jokes, and not very funny jokes at that.
Jones’ strength at this point is clearly as a monologuist, and it may be that the best way for television to exhibit her talents would be to broadcast “Bridge & Tunnel” or one of her earlier shows in its entirety.
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‘The Sarah Jones Show’
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Where: Bravo
When: 9 p.m. Sunday
Ratings: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)
Sarah Jones...Herself
Executive producers, Nancy Stern, Mary-jane April and Sarah Jones.
