NBC’s surprisingly good September

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 14:28:00 +0000

Last night, word leaked out that NBC will not be going ahead with “Mockingbird Lane,” its high-profile reboot of “The Munsters.” Despite detailed explanations of how the new project would be edgy and different from the 1960s sitcom, and the promise of a big, strong cast that included Eddie Izzard and Portia de Rossi, it always sounded like a pretty bad idea, or at least one that would be very difficult to execute well. The restraint shown by NBC in not ordering the series, one NBC has been talking about and up almost since the arrival of Bob Greenblatt, its still relatively new president, is another good sign for the network, which is having a surprisingly good autumn. Aside from airing “Guys With Kids” this fall, NBC is having the best pilot season of all the networks.

“Guys With Kids,” but no laughs

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 17:09:00 +0000

It’s rare for a television season to be as thoroughly dominated by one theme, one trend, as last year’s was by gender. 2011-12 was memorably, unceasingly the season of the single lady sitcom, with series like “New Girl,” “2 Broke Girls,” “Whitney” and "Girls" exploring the humor of being 20-something and frisky. 2011-12 was also less triumphantly, but not unrelatedly, the year of the sad man sitcom: Series like “Man Up,” “How to Be a Gentleman,” “Work It” and “Last Man Standing” focused on men lost in a new world order, out of touch with their machismo and regularly schooled by the much more confident women around them, exactly the sort of females popping up in all those single lady shows.

The new fall season does not have nearly the same volume of comedies with explicitly gender-oriented setups, but it does a have a few. There’s one single-lady sitcom, the pretty good “Mindy Project” (more on that when it premieres in two weeks), and one sad-man sitcom, NBC’s pretty bad Jimmy Fallon-produced “Guys With Kids,” which premieres tonight, and is the only representative of its genre I hope to see this year. The accurately titled show is a shameless bid on NBC’s part to go broad, and maybe co-opt the slightly younger, slightly more p.c. portion of the “Two and a Half Men” audience. It's a toothless junkball of a show, the sort of uninspired, reliable series a person is meant to turn on after a long day of work, so they can turn off.

Salon.com > Guys with Kids

NBC’s surprisingly good September

“Guys With Kids,” but no laughs