Creator: Betsy Thomas
Years: 2006-2010
Two things I love are baseball and poker, so when I saw advertisements for a show about a cute girl who covers baseball and plays poker with her guy friends, I was in like Flynn. Jordana Spiro covers the Cubs for the local paper, and boy do the players give her a hard time.
That’s probably the only realistic part of the show. Her actual knowledge of baseball is pretty weak for someone who covers it for a living and her opinions about it left me wanting. The baseball itself seemed more or less a backdrop to her personal struggles, which didn’t really interest me. The poker is also basically a backdrop to a bunch of gabbing. At least they didn’t try to pretend that all of her boys were just platonic friends. There’s a ton of product placement for Match.com that gets annoying.
It’s a somewhat charming show and Jim Gaffigan provides some comic relief. I only made it part way through season two before my life got busy and then I never went back to it. I always wanted to, but if the show was that great, I would have gone back to it, no?
Death By Troggles 
I think you were pretty generous here. This show had a horrible cast and, as you said, a baseball writer who knew nothing about baseball. The writing was just completely tone-deaf, as Spiro’s character would often complain about sports fans in a way that only people who hate sports would complain about them.
One of the worst-acted scenes I’ve ever seen in my life is one where Gaffigan’s character is drunk and Spiro is trying to help him through it. He’s mugging and overacting all over the place, and as a result she has no idea what to do. I only saw about three or four episodes’ worth of this, but god did I loathe it.
Oh, you reminded me of that awful scene. I wonder how much of that is Gaffigan not having much acting talent versus shoddy direction. Either way, yeah, this is probably ranked 10 spots higher than it needs to be.