Family in comedy on Netflix evokes more gentle era

Now that Netflix has taken us back to 1985 with the third season of “Stranger Things,” it also is looking backward with the upcoming sitcom “Family Reunion,” set to debut July 10.

And though the streaming service works in mysterious ways (literally — Netflix does not share data, even with the people who make its shows), the point seems to be to reach back to a lighter, pre-cynical age of comedy.

“Family Reunion,” created by Meg Deloatch, who also worked on the Netflix sitcom reboot “Fuller House,” is a program that recreates an old form, much as a modern housing development might suggest the good old days with carved newel posts and covered porches.

In the series, an African American family abandons big-city Seattle for down-home Columbus, Georgia, and the ample bosom of its kin. Family is the family you make here, even if they actually are related to you.

The pilot — as of this writing, the only episode available for review — opens on a porch, that of M’dear (Loretta Devine, lately of “The Carmichael Show”) and Grandpa Mckellan (Richard Roundtree, star of the 1971 movie “Shaft”).

Onto this porch steps their grown son, Moz (Anthony Alabi), who is back from the West Coast with his own family in tow: wife Cocoa (Tia Mowry) and four kids, of which teenage daughter Jade (Talia Jackson) is the one who is more than cute.

The events of the pilot convince Moz and Cocoa to abandon white-bread city life for country comforts, kin and “our culture.” (“Whoa, look at all the black people,” says one of the kids on a trip to church; he has never seen so many in one place.) It’s a decision the parents announce before talking with their children, but this is the sort of show that will make sure to have them apologize for that. Still, only Jade is less than thrilled with the idea.

Because of that resistance, the focus is very much on her — Jade is never offstage for long — and, for much of its pilot, “Family Reunion” plays like a kid-centric Disney Channel sitcom or something out of ABC’S old TGIF lineup (once home to Mowry’s “Sister, Sister”).

But if it’s Jade’s story, it’s Devine’s show. An airy flute with the authority of a French horn, she floats lightly upon the ground but can also plant herself squarely upon it. She brings life and meaning to lines a lesser actor might throw away. (I am partial to her, I admit.)

You can practically hear the machinery being hauled into place at times, and not every plot point is equally likely. But the spirits are high (there is dancing on three occasions), and the cast — also including Telma Hopkins in a guest spot as M’dear’s sister and Warren Burke as Moz’s brother Daniel, a familiar (but wellplayed) sort of scamp — is game.

Most important, it offers families half an hour of comedy free from embarrassing surprises — there is surprisingly little of that on television — and the sometimes loud conversations concerning new versus old parenting styles and what kids can or can’t get away with accommodate a range of viewers.

Of course, everyone meets in the middle eventually — not a bad place to leave us in the end.