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.

FIT FOR JAYSON

It's almost time for the 2010 MTV Movie Awards, you know the award show that MTV puts on that is usually hosted by someone we don't know or maybe we don't even really want to know? They will roll out the red carpet and have someone like Snooki interviewing the stars. (I know, it's not the Grammy's, so no Ryan and Guilliana, but it is MTV (you know the network that first started off playing music videos, then gave us TRL, and is now infiltrated with greasy Jersey shore wanna-be actors? Yep, you know that network I am talking about!)

Well the best thing to happen to MTV is the new teenage series by David Katzenberg that will debut after the MTV Movie Awards, called "The Hard Times of RJ Berger", and it happens to star a close friend and one of my hottest male clients, Jayson Blair. He's being tagged as MTV's newest heartthrob-- so ladies get your bras & panties ready for Sunday night, because I had my fitting with Jayson last night & we are about to pave his fashion future. Move over Zac, Chace, Robert, and Taylor, . . .there is a new hottie in town!