Awkwafina and Sandra Oh Deserve Better Than ‘Quiz Lady’
If you’ve ever crossed a real, live Jeopardy! fanatic, you know that they do not play around about missing their favorite game show. I had a friend in college who would commandeer our dorm’s basement television for half an hour so she could watch and guess along with the day’s contestants; she even got scarily good at guessing where the “Daily Double” might be on the board after only a couple of tiles had been cleared. She was a marvel, but even she wouldn’t be quite versed enough to compete with the titular wunderkind of Quiz Lady, a new comedy streaming Nov. 3 on Hulu.
Despite the film’s title, Quiz Lady isn’t just called “Quiz Lady” because it’s about a lady named Anne (Awkwafina) who loves quizzes. Well, it is. But Anne also loves a lot of other things, namely her very fat, very old pug named Mr. Linguini. She’s less keen on her older sister Jenny (Sandra Oh), who, at 10 years Anne’s senior, should be much more mature. Jenny and Anne have grown estranged after Jenny’s rocky adolescence, but when the fates—or rather, their mother’s gambling debts—pull them back together, Jenny sees it as a chance to make up for lost time while pushing Anne onto her favorite quiz show to win the money to cover their mom’s financial problems.
While Quiz Lady makes a considerable meal out of its fairly light family-bonding premise, it maintains the bare-bones feel of most modern studio comedies when it comes to its jokes. The laughs are scattered, but when they do arrive, they hit hard, even if only for a moment or two. Though Quiz Lady’s gags are sparse, they pair just nicely enough with the film’s big, beating heart to satisfy viewers looking for a perfectly enjoyable but instantly forgettable night on the couch.
Sandra Oh in Quiz Lady.
The trouble all starts when Anne and Jenny’s mother goes on the lam, absconding from her retirement home off to Macao to avoid the gang of debt collectors who are after her. When Jenny arrives to help Anne with the situation, Anne quickly learns that her sister—who is living out of her car—was planning to stay for a night or 20. Anne knows that her sibling’s flighty behavior attracts trouble, but she reluctantly lets her stay anyway, buying Jenny’s story about a big settlement check that’s about to come in after she choked on a fish bone at a chain restaurant.
Neither Jenny nor Anne have changed much since they were teenagers. Jenny is still the impulsive lummox she was back when her rashness got the two of them sent home from their aunt and uncle’s house as teens, where they had hoped to make a home after their parents had all but up and left. Anne, who has only retreated further into herself since, still finds solace in her dog and her daily viewing of Can’t Stop the Quiz, a fictional game show hosted by her idol Terry McTeer (Will Ferrell), a stand-in for Alex Trebek. When Jenny covertly films Anne answering every Can’t Stop the Quiz question ahead of the contestants and posts it online, Anne goes viral overnight, bringing her loads of attention she doesn’t want, including from her mother’s creditors, who recognize Anne on television and nab Mr. Linguini for collateral.
It’s all fairly straightforward from there. Quiz Lady isn’t heavy on plot twists and shenanigans outside of depicting the contrast between Anne’s drab day-to-day life and Jenny’s volatility. That does, however, result in some silly bits with Anne’s elderly neighbor Francine (a very committed Holland Taylor), who eventually plays a key role in tricking the anxious Anne into attending the Can’t Stop the Quiz auditions in Philadelphia. This road trip plot device is a welcome one, although exemplary of what Quiz Lady doesn’t do successfully: melding the extremes of comedy with enough believability to make them truly hilarious. There is never an adequate amount of bawdiness to make the film a raunchy movie, and not quite enough earnestness to hit a stride of comic relatability.
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Even when the movie starts to feel undermined by its low-concept, unambitious narrative, Quiz Lady is consistently aided by Oh and Awkwafina’s joint performances. Their sibling chemistry is genuine and amusingly recognizable, and it’s when the film leans into the intricacies of their dynamic that the entire affair brightens up. The movie even scores some truly tender moments as Jenny and Anne unearth the sacrifices that the two of them made for each other in the past. Quiz Lady sticks its landing with the kind of aplomb that’s so assured, you might be fooled into thinking the entire movie was that good. It helps that Oh is so damn game for anything, generating the film’s biggest laughs in a gross-out scene that becomes Quiz Lady’s most memorable moment.
Still, Quiz Lady is just underwhelming enough to make you long for the days of yore, when comedies were front-to-back funny. Watching Holland Taylor pitter-patter around this movie without much more to do than riff on the singular “I’m old” joke that she’s given made me woefully nostalgic for the days of her role in Legally Blonde. In 2001, it was so easy to take the studio comedy for granted; we didn’t know how quickly humor would change when everyone in the world got access to the internet. But even though the film’s writer, Jen D’Angelo, sometimes struggles to dredge enough humor out of ephemeral internet virality, Quiz Lady’s two shining lead performances make that easy enough to forget, if only until the credits roll.
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