tek's rating: ¾

Sunnyside, on NBC
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streaming sites: Amazon; Google Play; iTunes; Vudu; YouTube

This is set in the neighborhood of Sunnyside, in the borough of Queens, New York City. At the start of the series, a city councilman named Garrett Modi (Kal Penn) has just been replaced by newly elected councilwoman Diana Barea, after having been publicly disgraced by a viral video that made Garrett look bad. (I'll skip the details.) Now that he's unemployed, he moves in with his sister, a surgeon named Mallory Modi, who isn't exactly thrilled to have him there. Garrett had never taken his job as a councilman seriously, and basically just used it to have fun and hang out with celebrities and rich guys. Diana, on the other hand, takes the job very seriously, and wants to do all she can to make the city a better place for its residents. Meanwhile, Garrett finds new purpose in life by helping a group of immigrants study for their citizenship tests. They include a Dominican woman named Griselda, who holds many jobs, including one as a bartender at a bar where the group frequently meets. There's also Asian fraternal twin sister and brother, Mei Lin and Jun Ho, who come from an incredibly wealthy family, and are totally out of touch with how regular people live. And there's an Ethiopian man named Hakim, who was a surgeon before coming to America, where he currently drives a cab. And there's a Moldovan man named Brady, who... well, I don't know what to say about him. Another member of the group, initially, was an older Moldovan man named Drazen, but he was arrested by ICE in the first episode.

Anyway, the show was cancelled after only four episodes had aired, but the remaining seven episodes were released online each week thereafter. I'm not sure what else to say. I really wanted to like the show more than I did, because I like the premise of helping immigrants achieve their goal of becoming citizens. And I found it amusing enough, I guess. So I'm sorry it didn't last longer, but I probably won't miss it too much.


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