Reviews for
The Trouble with Larry were generally unfavorable, occasionally bordering on hostile. Ken Tucker of
Entertainment Weekly gave the show a grade of D+ and called the show "not just not-funny, but actively depressing". Hal Boedeker, writing for the
Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, opined that "the moronic sitcom was beyond bad, a disaster that raises doubts about the judgement of CBS executives."
David Zurawik of the
Baltimore Sun called the show juvenile, and wondered "How did this sitcom (using the word in its most expansive sense) ever make it on the CBS fall schedule?" Frazier Moore of The
Seattle Post-Intelligencer wrote that "
The Trouble with Larry is a sitcom so feeble yet brazen in its humormongering that it nearly takes the viewer's breath away." The
Orlando Sentinel's Greg Dawson praised the show's "first-rate" cast, but attacked the pilot's "dead-in-the-water writing" and "nonstop witlesscisms", and called the finished product "sophomoric dreck ... which tests the self-control of anyone with an IQ over 50 and a sledgehammer or handgun in the house." David Hiltbrand of
People, in a review that ran shortly after the show's cancellation, gave the series a C grade. Hiltbrand had mild praise for the "anarchic" pilot, characterizing the humor as "flip" and "batty", but wrote that subsequent episodes of
The Trouble With Larry were mired in "dreary domesticity". The show ran three episodes before being cancelled following the September 8 broadcast. Eleven days later, another series co-created by Andrew Nicholls and Darrell Vickers premiered:
It Had to Be You, starring
Faye Dunaway and
Robert Urich. It lasted four episodes, giving Nicholls and Vickers the unusual distinction of overseeing two of the earliest-to-be-cancelled new shows of the same TV season. ==References==