“Interesting Idea. Don’t Just Criticize, Pitch In. I Don’t Know That I’ve Ever Considered That Before.” “I’ve Never Seen You Do It.”
My search for a good sitcom brought me to Extended Family early in 2024. I thought it sounded promising. From Mike O’Malley, it featuring a family trying to figure out how to move forward from a divorce. I know, not exactly funny on the surface, but I have seen some great comedies that took off from there. Sadly, this wasn’t one of them.
As I said, Jim (Jon Cryer) and Julia (Abigail Spencer) have recently divorced. But, instead of making their kids, Grace and Jimmy (Sofia Capanna and Finn Sweeney) move houses each week, the exes have decided they will move into their old house for their week of custody, moving to their own place on their off weeks. Oh, and Julia is now engaged to Trey (Donald Faison), the owner of the Boston Celtics. Rounding out the cast is Jim’s father Bobby (Lenny Clarke).
Honestly, the storylines weren’t that surprising or original. They dealt with Jim trying to date again and he and Trey learning how to get along in their new family dynamic. Honestly, I appreciated the growth we saw for both of their characters when it came to dealing with each other.
But that’s the only character growth we got in the course of these 13 episodes. Anything else was forgotten by the time the next episode rolled around. I know, nothing new when it comes to sitcoms, but it was so obvious here it made me roll my eyes. It would have been nice to see a little of it stick. We also had man childs in both Jim and Trey, leaving Julia to be the long-suffering mature adult. Seriously, can we let this stereotype go already? And, I think this was my issue with the lack of character growth – I really wanted to see some maturity from more of the characters.
However, the show suffered from the biggest sin for a sitcom – it just isn’t funny. The laughs are few and far between. There were one or two good episodes, and usually there is a laugh in each episode. But that’s about it. Maybe it’s because I don’t find the characters that funny. Or maybe it’s because we’ve seen these storylines before with this show adding nothing original to it character or punch line wise. But I still go back to my thoughts on modern sitcoms revolving around tone. I feel like the scripts are winking at us the entire way through – “Notice how funny we are. Wasn’t that a clever line. Laugh.”
Going along with that was the laugh track. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love a good laugh track, which usually comes from a show that was filmed in front of a live audience. Somehow, I catch that energy and laugh along. I know actors talk about feeling that energy from tape night, and I swear some of that magic comes through to my living room as well. Anyway, I doubt this show was filmed in front of a live audience. While the majority of each episode is filmed in what could have been multicamera format, we get inserts of the characters commenting to the camera on the action. I feel like, because of those cuts, it wasn’t filmed in front of a live audience. But again, I could very easily be wrong.
Since there were only 13 episodes of the show and there wasn’t much else on I was interested in, I stuck with it through the end of season 1. But I wouldn’t have returned for season 2 of Extended Family. NBC cancelled it, so it isn’t an issue either way. If you haven’t watched the show, you really aren’t missing much.
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