Review: Perfect Harmony, season 1

Perfect Harmony is an NBC comedy. I recently watched all of season 1 in a big gulp on Hulu.

Bradley Whitford stars as Dr. Arthur Cochran, a famous conductor. He goes to a small town in Kentucky to bury his wife and doesn’t leave. I like Bradley Whitford. He’s done many roles I thought were supportive of women and feminist in nature. In this comedy series, he’s arrogant and entitled. A cosmopolitan sophisticate does not fit into this small town.

Somehow this world famous conductor gets roped into leading the small choir of the church where his wife is buried.

Also starring is Anna Camp as Ginny. She’s is the process of divorcing her husband Wayne (Will Greenberg). He’s a great dad to their kid Cash (Spencer Allport), but a terrible husband.

Ginny and Wayne are in the choir. Others include Reverend Jax (Rizwan Manji), Dwayne (Geno Segers), Karla (Desi Dennis-Dylan), and Adams Adams (Tymberlee Hill). Adams is Ginny’s boss in the diner where she works.

There are many others in the small town, including those in a bigger, rival church with a huge choir.

The show is family friendly and mostly wholesome. There are no deep undertones or themes. There are a few sex jokes, a few references to not believing in God, but it’s something you could watch with the kids. I thought the comedy bits were reused too often and grew stale by the end of the season.

There was a big effort to have an inclusive cast, but there were no LBGTQ characters.

My favorite episode of the season was Merry Jaxmas, which included a Bollywood Christmas performance by the choir.

The series was created by Lesley Wake. She’s a veteran TV writer, but Perfect Harmony is the first series she created herself. Three of the 10 episodes in season 1 were directed by women: Katie Locke O’Brien and Natalia Anderson.

Hat tip to my friend @redcrew. She suggested this series to me. She thought the characters were a bit like Northern Exposure, which is one of my all time favorite TV shows. I didn’t see a resemblance. What do you think?

Here’s the season 1 trailer.