The sitcom is still going strong
Tune in to these 6 new television shows this season
The great American sitcom! With its couches and kitchens, its upstage stairs and stage right doors. So central to our culture and so often mocked — made the emblem of television at its least imaginative and most imitative, at its tritest and tiredest. Witlessness presented as wit.
There is some truth in it; examples, at any rate, may be found to confirm one’s worst opinion of the form. And yet the big intellectual content bidding wars of the streaming age have been over comedies — “Friends,” “The Office,” “Seinfeld.” They leave an impression as great or greater than the Quality Dramas upon which the reputation of Titanium Age television rests. It isn’t that life can’t be gritty or hard, but TV rarely pictures the gritty hard lives people actually lead. But we see ourselves in sitcoms and as a bonus, laugh.
In the pandemic year, they have
amazingly kept coming, even as the pandemic itself is not pictured in them or is briefly acknowledged as a thing that’s over. Let’s look at several that have recently premiered.
‘Call Your Mother’
Kyra Sedgwick stars as Jean, an Iowa woman whose grown children — son Freddie (Joey Bragg) and daughter Jackie (Rachel Sennott) — are living in LA. Having not heard from Freddie for four days, she travels to LA to check on him. (Jean doesn’t worry about Jackie, who takes this as not caring.) The pilot strains a little; Sedgwick’s character seems to be built on the back of jokes, rather than jokes proceeding naturally from character, and she seems a little insane at first. But once she’s in the comfy Airbnb-esque guest house run by quasi-love interest Danny (Patrick Brammall) and the other characters, including Jackie’s roommate (Austin Crute) and Freddie’s girlfriend (Emma Caymares), have entered their mutual orbits, things relax and improve. (ABC)
‘Country Comfort’
Katherine McPhee plays Bailey, freshly dumped by her boyfriend-bandmate. Breaking down in the rain on the way out of town, she more or less accidentally gets hired as a nanny for handsome, widowed horse rancher Beau
(Eddie Cibrian). In several respects, it’s a rewrite of Fran Drescher’s “The Nanny,” on which creator Caryn Lucas was a producer and a writer.
Every episode brings a crisis and a resolution, and a little more love. “You’re the worst nanny we’ve ever had,” says Beau, on the way to a Western metaphor, “but you’ve got a heart the size of Texas.” It is highly predictable and quite watchable. (Netflix)
‘Kenan’
This family-and-workplace comedy brings Kenan Thompson back to series television 21 years after the end of Nickelodeon’s “Kenan & Kel.” (He has been a cast member of “Saturday Night Live” in nearly all the meantime.) Here, he plays the host of an Atlanta morning show.
Kenan, also named Kenan in the show, lives with his twin daughters (Danni and Dannah Lane) and gambler father-inlaw (Don Johnson), who bets on plot twists in “This Is Us.” Chris Redd, also from “SNL,” plays eccentric brother Gary, who is also his manager.
Produced, one might almost say inevitably, by Lorne Michaels, the show plays to Thompson’s natural sweetness and boyishness. Much of the action revolves around the family, who seem authentically related, but there are also excursions into manic hijinks where grown men get everything wrong and wind up breaking stuff. Anyway, it’s an easy hang. (NBC)
‘United States of Al’
Adhir Kalyan plays Awalmir, called Al, an Afghan translator who has come to America to live, for a time at least, with Riley (Parker Young), a Marine with whom he became friends. Unlike “Aliens in America,” a 2007 CW series about a Pakistani Muslim exchange student, it is not satirical and treads so softly upon the issues it halfraises that it may as well be “Punky Brewster.”
As a stranger, Al will charmbully his American friends into seeing things with his new eyes. But there’s serious business regarding Riley’s return to civilian life: He’s separated from wife Vanessa, played by Kelli Goss, a situation Al is annoyingly, determined to fix. (“You’re an optimistic little dude, ain’t ya?” observes Riley’s father, played by Dean Norris.) But these scenes feel more put on than lived through. On the other hand, when it spends quality time with Riley’s sister Lizzie (Elizabeth Alderfer), quietly off the rails since the death of her helicopter pilot fiance, it finds weight and realism the rest of the show doesn’t quite achieve. (CBS)
‘The Crew’
Kevin James stars here as the crew chief of a struggling — but not very hard — NASCAR racing team: “Twenty years ago we were fighting to lead the pack, now we’re fighting to lead the middle of the pack,” a comedown that does not seem to bother him particularly or interfere with his self-satisfaction.
To make a sitcom out of it, the boss’ daughter, Catherine (Jillian Mueller), a Stanford graduate and Silicon Valley vet, is suddenly put in charge. Monday morning meetings are called, and kale chips and seaweed strips replace the traditional bags of junk food by the coffee machine. The new boss is not the same as the old boss.
The cast — including Dan Ahdoot, Gary Anthony Williams, Freddie Stroma and Sarah Stiles — is very good, with enough depth and breadth that jokes can come from character. They’re fun to watch, but I never felt especially invested in the plots. But I laughed some. (Netflix)
‘Punky Brewster’
Soleil Moon Frye returns as Punky (along with Cherie Johnson as best friend Cherie), still saying “Holy macanoli!” and wearing mismatched sneakers, but 33 years older, newly divorced and the mother of three: The younger two (Noah Cottrell and Oliver De Los Santos) are adopted brothers and the third (Lauren Lindsey Donzis) is her teenage daughter with ex-husband Travis (Freddie Prinze Jr.), a musician just “off the road” and proactively hanging around.
Developed by Steve and Jim Armogida, it’s a Feel the Feels affair in which eyes oft brim with tears, understanding smile meets understanding smile, and a bed is just a place for the whole family to pile onto with popcorn and a dog. There’s nothing here that strives to be remotely novel. But as a new season of “Punky Brewster,” it is unimpeachable. (Peacock)