PILOT REVIEW: The Kids Are Alright

THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT

Starring: Mary McCormack, Jack Gore, Sam Straley, Caleb Foote, Sawyer Barth, Christopher Paul Richards, Andy Walken, Santino Barnard, with Tim Doyle, and Michael Cudlitz

Created by Tim Doyle
Written by Tim Doyle, Directed by Randall Einhorn

IN SHORT: If The Goldbergs Were 10 Years Older and Catholic

THE PREMISE:
Set in the glorious 1970s, The Kids are Alright is centered on an Irish Catholic family with eight boys making life crazy for mother Peggy (Mary McCormack) and father Mike (Michael Cudlitz). The boys range from college aged to a baby. Oldest son Lawrence (Sam Straley) is home from his first year at seminary and thinking about leaving the path to becoming a priest. The narrator looking back in this show is Timmy (Jack Gore), a pre-teen who is attempting to find his performing arts side in the pilot.

THE REVIEW:
I think if this show had premiered five or six years ago, I would have been super excited about it. But as much as I hate to admit it, I think I have a little bit of ABC family comedy fatigue. That doesn't mean I'm not still watching pretty much every sitcom on ABC besides Speechless because I am. But everything kind of follows a similar formula. Families fight a lot but they learn something about what it means to be a family by the end of the episode.

That's not to say that I hated everything about The Kids are Alright. There are a lot of good things about it. The family seems very real and a family with that many kids hasn't been seen in a sitcom in awhile. Mary McCormack is funny, but I inevitably compared her to the superior Wendi McLendon-Covey from The Goldbergs. She still had some good one liners and some funny comedic timing. I didn't think Michael Cudlitz did enough to establish himself as the patriarch of the family. He seemed to be in the background for a lot of the episode, even when he was integral to the plot. He also had an unfunny "phony news" line that has been played all summer in promos and wasn't any funnier in the episode.

Whereas the pilot and early episodes of The Goldbergs seemed a little "too 80s," I actually think The Kids are Alright could stand to be a little more 70s. I didn't think there was enough in this episode to firmly root it in the 1970s. It didn't need anything overt, but it could have used some more clever and small details. This is an era that can be evoked in very strong ways (look at The Wonder Years) but it just didn't have that ping of nostalgia that I think it needed.

BOTTOM LINE:
I think this show will be pretty good but something's got to give at some point for me with these ABC comedies. Maybe this will be the odd one out or maybe it will push a different one off my list. But something's gotta go.