ABC’s ‘Home Economics’ a rare look at class on TV
In recent years, class has been the unspoken element of TV comedies.
The genre that gave us the Bundys, the Conners and the Simpsons — all families whose neighborhoods lay a distance from wealth — had moved onto “Modern Family’s” Pritchetts and “Black-ish’s” Johnsons. These families, the standard-bearers for the family sitcom in the 2010s, had enough concerns to fuel multiseason runs, but money rarely seemed to be one.
This left on the table one of the major stories of American family life and created a sort of airless feeling. If these folks could afford to do anything, where was the tension?
It’s refreshing to see the sitcom take up social class as a concern once again. The next step is to come up with something worth saying. ABC’s “Home Economics” has a canny idea and game cast, and though its first two episodes lack a surefootedness, there is potential. The challenge the show faces will be coming up with ways to complicate rather than restating its premise.
That premise is an elegant one. Three siblings who live near occupy three rungs of the social ladder, with Jimmy Tatro enjoying a blithe wealth, Caitlin McGee struggling to keep her family afloat and Topher Grace in the middle. Tatro, of “American Vandal,” brings an arrogance to the role.
His Connor has what his siblings want, and unpleasant character traits, yet Tatro’s energy makes the role spark. McGee, paired with Sasheer Zamata of “Saturday Night Live,” bounces off of him with a note of resentment. Grace — playing a novelist dependent on his siblings for material — tends toward a sort of watchfulness.
This dynamic makes up for some shortfalls. The children of these siblings are not distinguished in the first two episodes, and there is not a great deal for Grace’s wife (Karla Souza) to do. The siblings’ parents (Nora Dunn and Phil Reeves) play favorites, preferring Tatro’s character as he has promised to pay for their vacation, and speak insultingly broken Spanish to Souza’s character; it’s a cruelty that strains what is elsewhere a pretty grounded show.
And the plot detail that Grace fears writing about his siblings will turn his siblings against him tends to reject development — they presumably will find out and snap, but attempts to conceal borrowing feel like delaying the inevitable.
In all, it’s early days for a show with a fair amount on its mind and a good sense of who its three leads are.