dopiness

The show is both genuinely funny and unabashedly silly, and director and choreographer Josh Rhodes has his hands full reining in some of the sitcom dopiness.

The story is after all set in the fictional Cob County, where the locals, long isolated from the rest of the world by a wall of “cornrows,” live in the perfect “hominy” of entrenched dopiness.

“Singleton takes the aggressive, one-note conflicts of the action genre and builds whole networks of resentment out of them. This lends the picture a weird authenticity, despite the general dopiness of the plot.”

A show about beauty — as well as friendship, community, gender, power, empowerment and the correctable dopiness of dudes — “Betty” is beautiful itself.

Whether that line is supposed to be funny, a little bit funny or not funny at all is hard to say, and there are times when the show’s seriousness shades into dopiness, when its intentions are laid out like bullet points.