Not Great, Bob: Examining The Spotty TV Track Record Of James Wolk As A Leading Man

Where to Stream:

Ordinary Joe (2021)

Powered by Reelgood

When you watch a lot of TV, it’s impossible not to notice there are some stars who keep coming back, headlining pilot after pilot…which they’re able to do because those pilots that they’re headlining don’t last. Assembling a lasting TV show involves alchemy — part science, part magic — so there are good reasons why particular actors seem to get more chances than their peers. Maybe a showrunner has a special affinity for them. Maybe a casting director sees a spark and keeps trying to make them happen. Matthew Perry was a regular on three one-season series before he got Friends; Mark Feuerstein made four before Royal Pains became a hit on USA. Lucy Hale only had two failed series under her belt when she booked Pretty Little Liars, but she’s been chasing that high since, through two more short-lived series (though the latest — Ragdoll, coming this November — may break the curse). Bonnie Somerville has been an opening-credits cast member in five one-season series (plus the final season of NYPD Blue), and is still waiting for a breakout hit she’s starred in from the jump. James Wolk probably hasn’t tried to launch that many more series than his peers, but when you saw him — three of him, in fact — in the trailer for NBC’s Ordinary Joe, you still might have thought, “…Him? Again?”

There’s no mystery as to why James Wolk has gotten so many chances to become a TV star — or, at least, there isn’t for anyone who’s seen his adorable face and pleasingly toned and unwaxed body. This guy? Is hot. It’s like, what if Kyle Chandler, but younger and he smiles more? Wolk is handsome but accessible, and he can act? This is the kind of guy anyone would want to invite into their home on a weekly basis.

Wolk was still a very fresh face — he’d played a teacher with Tourette’s Syndrome in the Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation Front Of The Class and the love interest Kristen Bell and Odette Yustman are fighting over in the feature film You Again — when he was cast as the lead in the 2010 Fox pilot Lone Star. Wolk played Robert, a con artist dating one woman, Lindsey (Eloise Mumford), in Midland, Texas; married to another, Cat (Adrianne Palicki), in Houston, where he went by Bob; and scheming to take over his father-in-law’s oil business. Critics lavishly praised the series, which apparently made absolutely no difference whatsoever in its fortunes; Lone Star was cancelled after its second airing. Nevertheless, it did achieve something important: it made TV commentators and tastemakers fall in love with James Wolk.

LONE STAR, James Wolk, (Season 1), 2010. photo: Patrick Ecclesine / © Fox  / Courtesy: Everett Colle
Photo: ©20thCentFox/Courtesy Everett Collection

Wolk went on to book other series that fizzled: the ad-agency sitcom The Crazy Ones; the miniseries Political Animals that probably could have turned into a regular series if it had been popular (Big Little Lies and The Handmaid’s Tale were once “limited series,” too); Tell Me A Story, which technically had a second season, but which Wolk wasn’t in. Wolk’s longest-running series, at three seasons, is CBS’s action series Zoo; in that case, though, a case can be made that Wolk was actually a secondary character, and that the homicidal animals were the show’s true stars.

One might also argue that Wolk is most compelling on TV when he’s not trying to be the main character. On Happy Endings, he popped up as Grant, one of the best love interests Max (Adam Pally) ever had. He appeared in HBO’s multiple Emmy-winning Watchmen adaptation as affable villain Joe Keene — the most chilling kind of villain there is! And perhaps it was his work as a con artist in Lone Star that brought him to the attention of Mad Men producers, who cast him as Bob (same name!), someone Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) certainly thinks is grifting his way through his employment. You know the “Not Great, Bob!” meme you’ve seen on social media? Wolk is that Bob! And it is great to see him in supporting roles; it’s quite possible that his true destiny is actually to be an extraordinarily attractive character actor.

What you or I may want for Wolk’s career is immaterial, apparently, because either he or his management team continues getting him hired on as TV protagonists. The latest, premiering September 20, is Ordinary Joe. We first meet Wolk, as the titular Joe Kimbreau, at his graduation from Syracuse University. Arriving late, he chances to meet Amy (Natalie Martinez), and they both catch the end of a valedictory speech delivered by Jenny (Elizabeth Lail), Joe’s best friend and maybe more. After the ceremony, Joe has a choice: ask out Amy; take Jenny up on her invitation to her family’s beach house so they can talk; or have dinner with his family. Every decision we make has consequences, and no one can know for sure what might follow from options not pursued — not even Joe, though we watch where each branching path leads. Ten years later, the Joe who asked out Amy is a wildly successful musical artist married to her, but they are struggling to start a family together. The Joe who went to the beach is a doctor and father, but he’s in the process of ending his marriage to Jenny. And the Joe who had dinner with his family is an NYPD officer — just like his late father, who died on September 11, 2001 — but he’s unmarried, which is why it’s convenient that he reconnects with Amy over an incident on the congressional campaign she’s working on. Think of it as a mashup of the parallel plots of Sliding Doors and the time-jumping family drama of This Is Us.

ORDINARY JOE NBC SHOW
Photo: NBC

Will Ordinary Joe end the way so many of Wolk’s previous pilots have: dead before renewal? Will it air more episodes than Zoo? Is it possible that where one Wolk failed — or, as in Lone Star, almost two — three Wolks are an unstoppable force? If Wolk has another Joe Keene or Bob Benson in him, but that he could only do if his schedule cleared up, it’s hard to know what to root for.

Ordinary Joe premieres on NBC on Monday, September 20.

Writer, editor, and snack enthusiast Tara Ariano was the co-founder of Television Without Pity, Fametracker, and Previously.TV. She co-hosts the podcasts Extra Hot Great and Again With This (a compulsively detailed episode-by-episode breakdown of Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place), and the co-author with Sarah D. Bunting of A Very Special 90210 Book: 93 Absolutely Essential Episodes From TV’s Most Notorious Zip Code (Abrams 2020). She has also contributed to New York, the New YorkTimes Magazine, Collider, Vanity Fair, Slate, Mel Magazine, Vulture, Salon, and The Awl, among many others. She lives in Austin.

Watch Ordinary Joe on NBC