Ultimately, CBS' nefarious attempt to draw people to watch this Mutchnick/Kohan dud by pairing it with the still-popular "How I Met Your Mother" failed entirely and it's possible that the only person entrapped to stick with "Partners" was me. And what I saw was the same thing each and every week: Hackneyed gender and sexual stereotypes funneled into the mouthes of a very talented cast, usually without any sort of episode-to-episode plot to move things along. And what plot there was boiled down to the same thing every week, echoed across three ill-suited characters: For 20-ish minutes Michael Urie's character would do something annoying and unappealing to jeopardize his friendship with David Krumholtz's character and his relationship with Brandon Routh's character. In the last two minutes, the show would try convincing us that Urie wasn't playing the most annoying person on Earth and that he meant his obnoxiousness with love and everybody would hug. The same thing would happen with Krumholtz's character and his fiance, played by the game-for-anything Sophia Bush. They'd make no sense as a couple for 20 minutes and then one of them would pretend that their lack of compatibility was a sign of double-secret compatibility and they'd kiss. If Kohan & Mutchnick hadn't had one big success 15 years ago, there's no way a network would have allowed this show to make it on the air without a near-total overhaul.