Larry Doyle

Peter Travers went to a screening of I Love You, Beth Cooper and found himself wondering “how a movie could be this unfunny, this dead on arrival.” Perhaps we should have seen this coming; despite the reasonable success of the novel the movie is based on, Larry Doyle is getting to be one of those writers whose name on a film or TV show sets off all kinds of mental alarm bells. Not just TV, actually, since one of his other credits is writing the late ’80s/early ’90s revival of Pogo, which — according to Doyle himself — bombed because “the writing wasn’t very good.” (The drawing, by Neal Sternecky, was quite good, and the writing improved a bit after Doyle left, but too late to save the strip.)