Happy’s Place Review 2024 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
Happy’s Place is a bar in Knoxville that Bobbie has run for her dad — named Happy, of course — for the last decade, but after his recent death, she’s now the owner. Her bartender Gabby (Melissa Peterman) is always trying to be her friend; her accountant Steve (Pablo Castelblanco) is a major germaphobe, and her waiter Takoda (Tokala Black Elk) can fix anything. The cook, Emmett (Rex Linn) tries to stay in his tiny kitchen as much as possible to avoid interacting with anyone, though he tends to give sage advice when people come to him.
A twentysomething woman named Isabella (Belissa Escobedo) walks in, and she tells Bobbie she’s meeting a lawyer who called her. The lawyer (Michael O’Neill) is a buddy of Happy’s, whom he asked to make out his will. Turns out that Isabella is also Happy’s daughter, and she owns half of Happy’s Place.
Of course Bobbie is shocked that her father had an affair, and that she’s got a sister who’s young enough to be her granddaughter. Isabella, who didn’t find out about Happy until after he died, has never felt she belonged anywhere, so she feels this opportunity is a fresh start. But she starts off on the wrong foot, asking why Steve sits at the bar while he does his work, for instance.
Izzy does ingratiate herself to the rest of the staff, though; Gabby just loves the fact that Izzy listens to her, when Bobbie never really did. Bobbie, who’s head is spinning, feels like Izzy is making too many changes too fast — she only got there a the day before! But the staff — especially Gabby — likes having her around.
One of the things you notice right away with Happy’s Place is that it’s not trying to go for big, broad laughs most of the time. Peterman, who was so good with McEntire on Reba, is there to take most of the physical comedy load, as we see when Steve blasts Gabby with compressed air in Episode 1 and she gets sprayed by a broken tap in Episode 2. Even though her character is largely undefined except for her neediness, her presence allows the rest of the cast to dig into their characters and let the humor come from that.
McEntire proved in the ’00s that she’s a fine sitcom actor, mainly because she can be over-the-top angry or annoyed while being empathetic and easy to root for. Bobbie isn’t much different than the role she played on Reba, but that’s OK. One of the purposes of Happy’s Place was to give McEntire another opportunity to be that character, albeit now dealing with the shock of having a sister who’s 40 years younger than she is that she never knew about.
At this stage of the series — critics got the first two episodes to review — Happy’s Place is pretty much a classic workplace sitcom, where we don’t get much insight into the characters outside the confines of the bar. Will Abbott and his writers expand that universe at some point? Sure. But he’s relying on how the people at Happy’s interact with each other to be the source of the show’s humor, and there’s nothing we can really complain about if that’s the case.
Of course, the first two episodes aren’t exactly laugh riots, but they do set up the relationship between Bobbie and Isabella well, with enough from everyone else to give us an idea who these characters are. We’d rather have that, which gives room for the cast to gel and grow together, than episodes full of lame gags that reek of desperation.
