K-SCORE: 21
Creators: Jon Lucas, Scott Moore
Spoiler Level: Moderate
“I wanted the format to work just because it’s not what most TV shows do, but it doesn’t”
Thirteen episodes, ten strangers - most of whom aren’t strangers at all - one bar, five couplings, one night, all on a quest to have sex before the evening is out. Wait. I mean, all on a quest to find love before the evening is out. I give you: Mixology!! Get it? Like, mixology is the art of making cocktails, but it’s also being used here to describe the mixing up of people and personalities to pair them off into appropriate romantic partnerships. Oh and the name of the bar is Mix. (Another bad name for a bar, though not as bad as Flanagan’s Cocktails and Dreams.)
“swing the swift hammer of cancellation”
I’d say the main problem with Mixology boils down to this: of the ten critical characters, Tom, Cal, Bruce, Dominic, Liv, Jessica, and Kacey are terrible. Seven of ten. I mean, admittedly no TV series but Archer has ever cracked the fifty percent character likability barrier. Still, this is a bad percentage given that the show is entirely focused on character work. They spend every episode at the same bar on the same night, so obviously nothing really happens. Even though Ron, Fab, and Maya are acceptable, it’s a hefty percentage of time spent lurking over the shoulder of these shallow annoying people.
Mixology is funny once for every twenty times it’s brutally awkward. Several of the relationships are forced. Anything done with Bruce is cringe-inducing. Maya is the best because it’s comical that her backstory is that she only dates literally professional athletes. She makes a decent “straight-man” for the absurd interactions of the others. Sadly they match her up with the spineless undeveloping Tom. All of the other relationships are even more disastrous. The British guy, Ron, is cruelly manipulated by the profoundly irritating Liv. Cal and Kacey have the personalities of dull, medium-sized, gray rocks, so come to think of it they are kind of perfect for each other. Bruce and Jessica have an overtly antagonistic relationship with no precedent for it turning around by the end of the night like the writers demand. And Fab and Dominic are more caricatures than characters, but at least funny occasionally.
To Mixology’s credit, the ending is better than I anticipated it would be. They didn’t do five fairytale endings. Some relationships fail, some succeed, some morph into simple friendships, and others are left ambiguous. In the show’s only moment of genius, the vane and beautiful Fab goes home with an obese Hawaiian who owns a pet pig.
The idea of having a number of romances overlapping on the same night is a little interesting. I wanted the format to work just because it’s not what most TV shows do, but it doesn’t really, or didn’t because the writing isn’t perfect, or even good. You need spectacularly entertaining characters in order for a collection of episodes like this to survive with very little advancement of plot. I’d say the producers were right to swing the swift hammer of cancellation down upon creators Jon Lucas and Scott Moore.
To be honest though, my biggest complaint has nothing to do with the characters, the structure, the writing, the acting - any of that. It’s that they all mingle in a bar where they’re able to order drinks in a timely fashion, have places to sit, and can hear each other over the din of the crowd. Now if Mixology had been exactly the same, all the same shots, but the only sound was a persistent blend of chattering drunkards and blaring music, then it would have been brilliant. Plus it’d be easier to write. Just replace two of every three lines with, “WHAT?!” and “I CAN’T HEAR YOU.” Then for the remaining 33% you can fill in stuff like, “Where’s my purse?” and “I have to pee,” and “Are you on Tinder?”
