Ground Floor may not be the most original concept, but the actors seem made for their characters. When watching the show I don’t think “Oh, there’s John C. McGinley playing Mansfield” and “Skylar Astin pretending to be Brody Moyer,” I wonder where the character ends and the actor behind it begins. John C. McGinley makes you forget he’s Dr. Cox because he owns Mansfield. As for Skylar Astin, it appears he pretty much plays himself with a new name, which he gets away with because he has only been in a few things.

If McGinley, Astin, and the rest of the cast weren’t so good at their roles, Ground Floor would be boring. In “The New Office,” an older employee is fired and the young ones stab each other in the back to impress Mansfield. Thankfully, Brody and Threepeat are quirky enough that the backstabbing is friendly and silly. For example, Threepeat discovers a cool new way to sit down that he calls “the Riker,” after Commander Riker from Star Trek: The Next Generation, but it backfires when it tries it in Mansfield’s office because the chair back was too large. All the kissing up to the boss doesn’t pay off, when no one gets the empty office. Mansfield decides to give it to his plant because it was the only thing in the room that didn’t annoy him.

In this episode, the ground floor doesn’t understand why the top floor is so competitive. Brody gives Jenny a parking pass that is meant to go to the person who most deserves it. Unsurprisingly, everyone on the bottom floor jumps at it and the parking pass brings out the worst in Jenny’s coworkers. However, they try to hide that from Brody. When they know Brody is around, the ground floor employees are nice to each other. When they think he’s not looking, they are just as backstabbing as the top floor. In the end, Brody proves his point.

Mansfield’s daughter Lisa, who goes by some odd pronunciation of her name to annoy her father, is introduced. She wants to do everything her father hates, so she has a bohemian hippie vibe and decides to date Harvard because he’s a ground floor guy, who shares her appreciation for recumbent bikes. Everyone on the top floor refers to the recumbent bike as a grown up tricycle. Mansfield, Brody, and Threepeat all feel above what they see as a childish toy. Mansfield eventually breaks down and goes riding with his daughter at the end of the episode.

Ground Floor is one of the shows where you are not show if it is actually good or it seems good because all the other new sitcoms are terrible. I want to believe it’s the latter, but there’s a real possibility that the show will decline in quality after the first season. Only time will tell whether or not Ground Floor has staying power.