Review: Robin Williams in The Crazy Ones

In the new CBS sitcom The Crazy Ones, Robin Williams stars as Simon Roberts, the temperamental head of a Chicago advertising agency called Roberts + Roberts, which he co-owns with his uptight daughter, Sydney (Sarah Michelle Gellar). He’s unorthodox and difficult: Roberts pulls Scottish accents at inopportune moments and boxes with a giant toy robot in his office. (So basically, he’s Robin Williams.) We’re meant to believe he’s a genius, because he explains to a roomful of McDonald’s executives in the pilot that his pitch is not about burgers and fries, but about the notion that “family is everything.”

Have you heard this somewhere before? The brilliant but mercurial creative director, the strained familial relationships, the man who is the beating heart at the center of mucky commerce? Oh, right, it’s Don Draper from Mad Men. (The two shows even share an actor, James Wolk, who plays the squirrelly Bob Benson on Mad Men and the slutty Zach Cropper on Crazy Ones.) And though the series are fairly different—Crazy Ones, a half-hour comedy, is terrible—both embrace the stock character of the stormy yet special creative.