Don’t Trust The B—- in Apartment 23 is a new sitcom about June (Walker; Gossip Girl) who arrives in NYC with a fiancé and a huge apartment paid for by her new job at a finance company.  Unfortunately she arrives the day the company goes under.  Left with no job and no home in a strange city she has to find both very fast and stumbles upon what seems like a dream roommate in Chloe (Ritter; Veronica Mars, Breaking Bad).  Unfortunately Chloe turns out to be a real bitch (hence the title), but in her own way she changes June’s way of thinking and exposes her to some truths of the world.

Apt 23 at first seems like a very average sitcom.  And it could still fall that way, I’m writing this review after seeing only the first two episodes.  But very quickly it emerges that there is more to it.  In the pilot it’s sort of hard to see any real specks of genius shining through, but to be fair it does have to set up the whole series premise and it’s characters.  There are a couple of things that start to shine there though if you look carefully, you’ll see the diamond below the rock.

The jokes that work best in the pilot episode are mostly from James Van Der Beek (Dawson’s Creek) who plays himself.  In the world of Apt 23 he is good friends with Chloe.  And in the pilot he really comes out with some funny stuff about himself and his career.  Big props to him for playing such a role and not taking himself seriously.  The other joke that really worked for me personally was the next door peeping tom/therapist played by Michael Blaiklock.

I gave the show a second shot and found myself super glad I did.  The second episode of the series is much improved and shows that the cast and crew have found a sort of niche for themselves and are headed in a positive direction.  This episode provides a lot of laughs and some great quotable/tweetable lines (like “panty hamster”).  It also feels like the chemistry between the cast is there now.

Speaking of the cast, the two leads are great.  I wasn’t familiar with the interestingly named Dreama Walker before but she’s really funny and reminds me of Joanna Garcia for some reason.  If you’ve ever seen Krysten Ritter’s work before then you probably already have at least a little love for her and she doesn’t disappoint here.  She’s great at playing a funny, cold, bitch who the audience actually likes.

Overall I’d say this show is off to a promising start.  It could use a better title.  ABC (and all networks really) need to stop putting faux offensive words in their titles to make people tune in and then censoring them.  It’s stupid, not edgy and is an immediate turn off.  But if you enjoy Happy Endings, which this show is replacing in the 9:30 Wednesday time-slot, then you should take a chance on it.  I think it has promise.

Also you can judge it right now for yourself.  The first 2 episodes are free on Amazon
and iTunes: