Television review: 'The Hard Times of RJ Berger'

Aside from a few novel details, MTV's latest is a by-the-book geek sex comedy for the Apatow Generation. In other words, a likely hit.

June 05, 2010
By Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times Television Critic

MTV On Sunday, MTV takes yet another step away from its original charter as a purveyor of music videos with "The Hard Times of RJ Berger," a single-camera sitcom about a boy with a big penis. Nevertheless, in moving what I suppose we may call "forward," MTV has created a show that goes right to the heart of the network's original aesthetic, the erotic dreams of adolescent males. It strikes me as no cultural coincidence that MTV launched, in 1981, on the eve of a wave of take-my-virginity-please teenage sex comedies —- "Porky's," et al. — that, like many an early music video, paired geeky boys with hot girls. "American Pie" revived the genre near the millennium; "Superbad" brought it back for the Apatow Generation.