The Mutual Friend

Bays, the cocreator of the television show How I Met Your Mother, debuts with an unwieldy story involving a bunch of people whose lives occasionally intersect in New York City. Tech millionaire Bill Quick, developer of an app called MeWantThat, finds meaning in Buddhism, while his wife, Marianne, spends her time shopping for the perfect piece of high-priced real estate. Bill’s adopted sister, Alice—currently a nanny with aspirations to become a doctor—navigates the treacherous shoals of online dating. Generally, everyone is always on their phones, delivering an unsubtle message about the characters’ disconnection from real life. The bare-bones plot revolves primarily around Alice’s attempts to achieve her goals, and sprinkled in are light moments stemming from the comic value of characters such as the elderly, dick-pic-sending New York City mayor Spiderman (pronounced Speedermin), and of a dating app called Suitoronomy. But while Bays’s prose has a distinct flair, he tends to ramble, with the style haltingly alternating between pages-long run-on sentences and blocks of paragraphs with nothing but ellipses. Despite a few good gags, this doesn’t add up to much. (June)

Correction: In an earlier version of this review, a character and a dating app were incorrectly described, and the mayor character was misnamed.