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70Good-hearted, eccentric and wry, Ride goes nowhere fast, but it has a fine time getting there.
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70The results are often wickedly amusing.
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70A goofy and likable new comedy.
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70The best thing about "Free Ride" is the lack of pressure to be about something. Trusting its talented cast to embody their own truths, it ambles and weaves, leaving space for the characters, even folks briefly bumped into, to nail a specific attitude or situation.
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60"Free Ride" is a bit more than passably good, but like "Arrested [Development]" it feels hard to love.
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60There's a breezy charm to the show.
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50Portions of "Free Ride" show promise, due mainly to the show's star -- Dean -- whose character remains grounded and sane, against all odds.
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50What you get from this sometimes outlandish family comedy is a sweet Ride, but one that is neither funny nor believable enough to command your loyalty.
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50[It has] just enough funny, semi-improvised moments to make you wish it was better.
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50The show... is partly improvised, a stunt used to richer effect on ABC's upcoming Sons & Daughters. [6 Mar 2006, p.41]
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50Free Ride can't milk any fresh laughs from this fish-back-in-water tale. [3 Mar 2006, p.96]
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50Everything about Free Ride is slightly exaggerated and artificial, including the odd facial expressions.
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50Mr. Dean is appealing as Nate and Mr. Sheridan is amusing as Dove, but the tone of the series is uneven.
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50It's made of familiar slacker material that's slightly freshened with an improvisatory feel as the actors um-and-ah their way to their punch lines. And it's blissfully missing the canned laughs that make the likes of ''That '70s Show" so obnoxious. Still, ''Free Ride" is far from essential TV viewing.
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50When the show clicks, as it does in several scenes, the improvised performances have a more natural look and feel than typical sitcom scripts. Elsewhere, the comedy feels forced and staged.
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50More of an amusing diversion than a laugh riot.
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40A fresh approach can take you only so far when the material is this tired.
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40It's not that bad, which leads me to believe that it could actually be good, if it weren't so neutered and lovable.
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38This "Free Ride," I suspect, will be over very soon.
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30Harmless and intermittently amusing, winning points by letting its actors indulge in improvisation, "Free Ride" is nevertheless about as unpromising as its lead character's aimless career goals.
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30"Free Ride," though improvised, feels like every other Fox comedy that has come and gone: It has generic young stars stuck in a stale boy-pines-for-girl story line.
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30"Free Ride" is crude, mean-spirited, and not nearly as fresh and innovative as the producers think it is.
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25Tonight's premiere episode doesn't have a single laugh in it.
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25This is a series that shimmers with potential -- until Dove shows up. Someone at the network must have thought "Free Ride" was too irreverently weird and creatively nuanced, so they made Dove as annoyingly cartoonish as possible.
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10This kind of comedy only stands a dim ghost of a chance if it has a lot of gratuitous nudity and substance abuse, along with the words ''National Lampoon'' in the title.
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10Everything's so shrill and flat, it's hard to tell when the writing stops and the improvisation begins.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 26 out of 47
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Mixed: 1 out of 47
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Negative: 20 out of 47
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JulesB.10
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sucksddean0awful. the lead actor kid, josh?? whatever his name is - i cannot stand him.
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dennismennis0