The premiere of Best Time Ever was a truly chaotic series of stunts, and enjoyment of it probably derives from just how staged you thought the audience interaction was. Either way, at a certain point it had a manic energy no other variety show of recent decades has come close to capturing, and that in itself is a strange sort of achievement.
[Neil Patrick Harris was] hampered here by a format that might work better on daytime TV than at night, and better in the U.K. than here, and by gimmicks that seem more in step with the Velveeta spirit of "America's Got Talent," and by a show that's almost willfully aggravating, he may have met his match with Best Time Ever.
Its ratio of energetic, entertaining segments to time-wasting, self-indulgent filler (on the part of Harris) just doesn't pencil out in the audience's favor.
I like the idea of Best Time Ever and would love to see this and Maya Rudolph's variety thing and even live episodes of Undateable encourage more network risk-taking. For that to happen, future episodes will have to be the best time ever for more than just Neil Patrick Harris.
Forced and frantic, what Best Time most often relied upon Tuesday night was the minimal pleasure of watching people be good sports--coupled with a seemingly unshakeable belief that seeing celebrities have fun is fun in and of itself.