'Browsers' Review: Amazon Serves Up More Youthful Navel Gazing

Browsers is Amazon’s latest comedy pilot targeting a younger generation obsessed with everything from Twitter to musical numbers describing their selfish, whiny emotions.

The show is about four interns hired by an online news website. They all come to the table with their own problems, sort of. One still lives with his dad, another is lost in a vague journey of self discovery and the other two are given no characteristics beyond the fact that one smokes weed and the other is gay.

It would be pointless to go into each of these characters and the issues with their presentations or their predictability because if I didn’t enjoy watching them in a 20-minute burst why would you enjoy reading about them for any time at all?

All you need to know is that these are not real characters, they are representations of various aspects of today’s youth from their whiny personalities to their complete naivete about real life. However these representations are not created to present any sort of interesting commentary on the shortcomings of today’s younger generation. They are created to sell a product … and that product is no good. 

The job that the interns perform in Browsers is to fetch coffee and find links on the web … and that’s it … and they still manage to complain. The biggest issue with the pilot is the fact that the annoying characters complain far too much about things that normal human beings can only manage to roll their eyes at.

Another aspect of Browsers that falls completely flat are the musical numbers. Whoever came up with that kicker should be kicking himself. The musical sequences contain no originality and are out of place. They are laced with irony, but I’m not sure that was on purpose. Why they are even a part of this show is a mystery to me.

The only part of the show I had any hope for was the role awarded to Bebe Neuwirth (Cheers, Frasier) as the head of The Daily Gush (where the interns are hired), but even that role is butchered by the script. She is given strange dialogue and a confusing personality, so it’s no wonder that Neuwirth’s performance underwhelms.

Overall, Browsers is a very poorly done pilot that never should’ve seen the light of day, but I suppose that is part of the broader content experiment Amazon is conducting.