TV reviews

In the US: Tuesdays, 10/9c, TBS

As we’re heading towards summer and old shows have started to finish but new shows have yet to start, I decided to use some of the free time that’s given me to play a little bit of catch-up with some of the shows I missed for one reason or another.

Your Family Or Mine is one such show. That began all of five weeks ago while I was away on my Easter break and compounded with the fact it airs on TBS – a network whose motto should probably be “what do you mean you’d forgotten about us? But we’ve got shows like… and… Oh. Take your point” – it’s basically slipped under my radar until now.

Which is odd, because on paper it’s an interesting show. For starters, it’s not only got Ed Begley Jr in the cast, it’s got Richard Dreyfus in his first series regular role since 2001’s The Education of Max Bickford. On top of that, it’s been adapted by Greg Malins (Friends, Ground Floor) from the Israeli show Sabri Maranan.

To make things even more interesting, despite essentially being a multi-cam, low budget, less diverse Modern Family, it’s got an unusual format. The show revolves around married couple Kyle Howard (My Boys) and Kat Foster (’Til Death, The Goodwin Games), whose lives in turn revolve around visiting each other’s families – Dreyfus is Howard’s father, Begley Jr is Foster’s. The unusual thing here is that the show takes it in turns – rather than giving us separate plots involving both families each episode, all the odd-numbered episodes are set exclusively at Dreyfus’s snooty/crass, brother-full household, while all the even-numbered episodes are set at Begley Jr’s touchy-feely, sister-full household. It even has different title sequences for the different weeks.

So, on paper, fine and possibly even interesting. The trouble is that in practice it’s just dreadful, which is why I only bothered with the first two episodes, despite five having now aired. Even that was too much.

For starters, the jokes veer between unfunny and just downright awful, and the unifying theme of the Howard family is “they’re epic dicks”. Much of the first episode is about Howard remotely spying on his new babysitter using a nannycam, which eventually fascinates the whole family as her friend turns up and they start talking about boys. The women, of course (!), want to know what happens about the babysitter’s boyfriend problems and whether her relationships survive; the men, of course (!), wonder if the college girls really ‘will go wild’ when a friend drops by – just as the porn movie they’ve apparently all watched would suggest.

This gives us a vivid scene of the 68-year old Dreyfus feverishly hoping that the teenagers in question will end up scissoring each other, preferably in the shower, right before his eyes. Try to burn that image from your mind, if you can.

On top of that, we have Howard’s younger brother illicitly setting up parties for those very same teenagers in Howard’s house and illegally selling Viagra, Howard’s doctor brother not caring – or even knowing – that his wife has been studying for a psychology degree for six months, and Howard’s mother (JoBeth Williams), who hates both her daughters-in-law, trying to get her to use her psychology training to prove Foster is an unfit mother.

You can pretty much see the odd-numbered episodes are not just an affront to comedy and human decency, but borderline paedophilia mixed with sociopathy.

The even-numbered episodes aren’t much better. While Dreyfus and his wife (Cynthia Stevenson) are at least quite a pleasing and loving couple, the two themes here is they all think Howard’s a dick who’ll mess everything up and all the girls are idiots. Much ‘hilarity’ ensues as Howard accidentally accuses one sister of dressing like a stripper, the other of having no fashion sense.

So skip the even-numbered episodes, too.

There’s not even much to ameliorate the situation more generally. Both Howard and Foster have inherently dull characters to play and they’re the show’s lynchpins. Filmed in front of a studio audience – I’m assuming not a live one, though, or at least if they were when they started watching, they weren’t by the end, almost certainly having improvised rudimentary suicide tools from their clothing and seating – the show doesn’t really lend itself to subtle performances, either. And even beside the jokes, the episodes’ plots are obvious and easy to guess – if you can’t spot what the revelation will be about the picture in the first episode, there really is no hope for you.

Not only then must we clock this up as yet another of TBS’s recent comedy disasters (10 Items Or Less, Men At Work, Are We There Yet?, Glory Daze), but also another Israeli comedy format import disaster (cf The Ex-List, Traffic Light). Perhaps not only should US networks stop trying to make what’s funny in another culturally different country funny in their own countries, but also TBS should get out of the comedy game altogether…

In the US: Sundays, 9.30pm ET/PT, Showtime

WASP dissatisfaction. How may I count the ways you’ve manifested yourself over the past decade or so on US TV? Well, there’s Satisfaction, obviously, and The Affair. There was Necessary Roughness and In Treatment, for those who like lots of therapy to cope with their dissatisfaction, Enlightened for those who wanted to think about rising above their job dissatisfaction. For those who are just dissatisfied with society and the Internet and social media, there was Selfie, while for those who were prepared to put up with their dissatisfaction in the hope things would get better, there was Togetherness and Marriage.

And let’s face, the dissatisfaction doesn’t stop there. You could probably add a few extras to that list, if you thought about it about.

Generally, the picture from TV would appear to be, if you’re middle to upper middle class in America and middle-aged, although things could obviously be a lot worse, apparently you’re just dissatisfied with how modern life is. Everyone seemingly caring about the young people who can barely even read a book, while you’re having to learn about the Facebook and the Twitter and foreigners, just to keep up. And just as your body’s getting all saggy and the sex is going away, you’re expected to be working out and taking protein like crazy, so you can have abs. There was no such thing as abs when you were growing up, was there?

All this while you’re having to work some well paid job that you don’t actually like that much.

And here we are with yet another slightly self-pitying ‘comedy drama’ about the same old same old. This was apparently so important to Showtime and its demographic that when its leading man actually died (Philip Seymour Hoffman, may he rest in peace), the network decided that it absolutely had to go ahead with the project with a new leading man (Steve Coogan).

Here Coogan plays a dissatisfied ad man (Mad Men), the ironically named Thom Payne, supposedly living the American Dream with his wife (Kathryn Hahn from Free Agents), but who’s disconcerted by all the young people who work for him, the young Swedes who are taking over the agency and basically everything in modern life. He’s the kind of knob who reads Camus on the train while everyone is reading the Kindle version of the paperback version of the hardback version of Steve Jobs’ biography. He hates his job, just as everyone else does, but more vocally, something that annoys his friend-boss Bradley Whitford.

And a more tedious half-hour it would be hard to find. Apart from the fact it’s mind-numbing repetition of a dozen other “grumpy old men” dramas, Coogan is just not American enough, either to say “asshole” as frequently as he does or to be dissatisfied with the American Dream that he’s so busy ripping apart. Not got a six-pack at 44, Steve? No one ever told you to get one – you’re English. So don’t worry about it, laugh at the Americans and their silly ways, and then go down the pub to laugh at them some more with your mates. Either that or get off your ‘ass’ and go down the gym like the American Dream you apparently want to embrace once upon a time tells you to.

Incidentally, I should note here that Coogan’s character is 44 years old. Is it because I’m 42 that I’ve read Camus and know who Frank Miller is, am on Facebook and can use Twitter? Am I in the sweet spot between generations, able to bridge the gap between young and old? Or is it because this isn’t the most well observed pieces of writing and actually, what the show thinks is a generational gap is actually a class gap?

I leave that one up to you guys to decide (be nice).

The show does try to liven things up a bit with Fight Club style commentary and dream sequences…

…that unfortunately lack any of its perception or fights, and a sequence in which Coogan has sex with a cartoon grandmother, but it’s not enough. By the end of it, you’ll be longing for the sweet release of death almost more than Coogan does.