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Sometimes, no matter how talented the people involved in a show are, things just don’t work. There’s just something about the chemistry, or the writing, or just some unknown factor, but what happens on screen just doesn’t jell. A new NBC sitcom, starring Jon Cryer, Abigail Spencer and Donald Faison, and created by Mike O’Malley, is one of those shows.
Opening Shot: A man walks into a lavish apartment he calls “the nest,” leaving a message with his ex-wife about the status of the kids.
The Gist: Jim (Jon Cryer) and Julia (Abigail Spencer) were married for 17 years, and they had 2 kids — Grace (Sofia Campana) and Jimmy Jr. (Finn Sweeney), but they got divorced about a year ago. As they tell someone off-camera, they feel they’ve set the example for amicable divorces; they even had a “reverse wedding” where they rip up their vows and walk out of the church backwards. They each live at “the nest” when it’s their week with the kids, and the other spouse lives elsewhere.
But Jim hasn’t quite cut the cord with Julia left; when he discovers that the goldfish they gave Grace when they got divorced is dead, he tries to cover things up. The first thing he does is call his father Bobby (Lenny Clarke), who comes clean that he lied to Jim about their pet cat’s death 40 years prior. Then Jim uses Find My Phone to track down Julia, who is on a date with Trey Taylor (Donald Faison).
Oh, yeah, Trey. Julia met Trey, the owner of the Boston Celtics, shortly after the divorce. Julia is a crisis manager, and Trey hired her to help him dig out of a situation where he made a highly controversial public remark about “red-headed stepchildren.” Their relationship has advanced to the point where they’re engaged, and Trey weighs in on Goldfishgate. While Jim and Julia, still vibing with their inside jokes, agree that they should cover things up, Trey thinks they should tell Grace the truth.
But Grace’s reaction about the fish isn’t really about the fish, it’s about how her parents feel like they won the whole divorce thing, even though no one consulted her about it.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Some of the plot of Extended Family sounds a lot like the Jenna Fischer/Oliver Hudson series Splitting Up Together, but mixed with a multicamera sitcom like Yes, Dear. We give that latter example because it starred Mike O’Malley, who created Extended Family.
Our Take: Extended Family is an example of a sitcom that just doesn’t work, despite all of the talent and experience in front of and behind the camera. We watched the first three episodes, which NBC made available for review, and while the third episode was incrementally better than the first, it still elicited only a chuckle. And that chuckle was more of a laugh than we had in the first two episodes.
O’Malley did base the premise on the relationship the real owner of the Celtics (Wyc Grousbeck) and his wife has with her ex-husband. So it’s not like the situation is outlandish. But the first episode is so disjointed, with the inexplicable trope of the main characters talking to the camera, to the silly flashbacks, to just the insanely tired plot of Jim trying to hide the fact that he killed his daughter’s goldfish — did we mention that Grace was 13 and not 6? — that we wondered if it had been rushed through after the strikes were over (apparently not; the show had about half a season in the can before the writers’ strike started last spring).
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The dialogue is way too fast in certain places, and whatever gags there are in some of those monologues don’t get a chance to breathe. Clarke, as funny as he is, is completely miscast as Cryer’s dad; it’s not even the actors’ relative closeness in age, but it’s the fact that there is no way Cryer’s perpetually-agitated character Jim was raised by the seemingly unbothered Bobby.
Cryer and Faison are, of course, sitcom veterans, and they both fit comfortably into their respective roles. However — and this is not the fault of Cryer — it feels like Jim at times gets off-the-rails crazy about the “rules” of the arrangement he has with Julia, indicating that he isn’t 100 percent OK with the fact that she and Trey got so serious so fast. But instead of having him just say that, O’Malley and his writers would rather have him act like an irrational lunatic at times.
Then there’s Spencer, who has been reliably excellent but has very little experience on multicamera sitcoms, and it shows. She overplays most of her gags, with wild gestures and line deliveries that give us the impression that she thinks that the format doesn’t favor the usual subtleties she brings to her roles.
Sex and Skin: None in the first three episodes. Though there is a gag in the second episode involving footprints behind a headboard that’s certainly not one for the supposed “family hour.”
Parting Shot: Jim is with Julia and Trey in Trey’s box at the Celtics game, and he takes pretty much everything he can carry because Trey told him to “help himself.”
Sleeper Star: There are no sleepers on this show. Even the kids are stock sitcom kids that are way more witty than kids their age are in real life.
Most Pilot-y Line: Bobby to Jim: “Sometimes being a monster is what fatherhood requires. Now it’s your turn, Frankenstein!”
Our Call: SKIP IT. Is there a chance that Extended Family can transcend its awful first three episodes? Sure; sitcoms take time to find their comedic footing. But when you’re starting with tired plots, scattershot storytelling, lame gags and stars who don’t use the skills we know they have, it’s an awfully steep hill to climb to get to mediocre.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
