Amazon Prime - Down Dog

Amazon only has two half hour comedy pilots this pilot season.  It’s kind of disappointing that neither offering has the ambition of Transparent, which has easily become Amazon’s most successful show to date, in every regard. 

That said, does Down Dog offer up enough potential to get picked up by Amazon? 

Down Dog is about Logan Wood (Josh Casaubon), a guy who has breezed through life, coasting on his looks, he eventually ends up as a yoga instructor in a studio he co-owns with his girlfriend Amanda (Paget Brewster).  When Amanda attends a wedding, which prompts her to question why she isn’t married and Logan gives the wrong answer via the phone. 

She breaks up with him and dissolves their partnership in every sense.  After a talk with his father, Logan decides not to give up on the yoga studio, she doesn’t fight him, deciding that she’d rather see him fail miserably.  Thus Logan becomes the proprietor of the studio and all that it entails. 

Down Dog is described as a “satirical look at LA’s yoga culture” and it feels very Cali centric.  I know that yoga is pretty much everywhere at this point, but I’m guessing that not all of the jabs will ring just as true throughout the country.  Also, the whole runner about Logan’s father being a pot grower probably carries more weight in the Golden State. 

Down Dog is a challenge because there’s really no one to root for.  The show has zero sympathetic female characters.  Winter (Lyndsy Fonseca)  is at best flighty and at worst manipulative.  Gabrielle (Alysia Renier) really only exists to undermine Logan.  And Amanda is slightly sympathetic until she relinquishes the yoga studio out of spite, just to watch her former beau fail.  And Logan is frighteningly vapid, to the point where he sleeps with someone else almost immediately after getting dumped. 

I imagine that, provided it’s picked up, Down Dog will be about Logan learning how to be an adult and business owner.   But he’s just not a character whose corner you can really get into. 

Down Dog wasn’t my least favorite of this batch of Amazon’s pilots, but that’s only because one was truly awful.