cornball

The show can border on the cornball; the characters are the sort you might have seen in the sort of dramas popular in 1868.

For all its emotionality, the dialogue can be a little flat, a little stiff, a little cornball.

The video monitors went their own crazy way, whether unmusically flipping from close-ups of fingers and lips or attempting surreal cornball special effects.

It’s intellectual, philosophical, sentimental, even cornball.

It’s in the series’ DNA to be a little cornball, and that there’s nothing overtly fancy or stylish in the production reflects the sort of nonliterary literature from which it springs.