Oh, Grow Up

It is three men and a dog in Brooklyn. They are best friends and former college roommates. Womanizing Hunter Franklin (Stephen Dunham) can't remember the girls' names. Norris Michelsky (David Alan Basche) is newly gay and divorcing Suzanne Vandermeer (Rena Sofer). Ford Lowell (John Ducey) is a struggling artist. Out of the blue, Hunter's 18 year old daughter Chloe Sheffield (Niesha Trout) shows up and he didn't know that she even existed. She is a film student starting NYU.

This is Alan Ball around the time of American Beauty. These are two opposite sides of Alan Ball's career. Before this, he's been involved with a couple of successful shows. This one feels like a variation on the Three Men and A Baby franchise except the three men are played by second tier stars. I don't want to be mean, but the biggest star on the cast is Rena Sofer. The writing is functional network sitcom material. It feels slap-dashed like maybe Alan is doing something more important elsewhere. I must have seen the show back in the day. A couple of lines in the pilot sound familiar, but I literally remember nothing else. There is nothing that great to remember. This is functional.

I missed the first two episodes, but caught the third. This show is hilarious. I pretty much agree with Brian Hamilton's review of the show, but to me, Stephen Dunham (Hunter) is the best of the line-up. He's a talented actor with great comic timing. However, I don't expect this show to be around for much longer. It's a sitcom about best friends hanging out together and it's hilarious, so, like many other shows, it'll probably be cancelled. But make sure you see it before it happens. And if it does, I hope someone will give Dunham a crack at another show. He's absolutely terrific!

One of the best new shows of the season, so far I've found only the episode of 12/28/99 disappointing. The show is loaded with silliness and an ensemble cast with great comic timing, but it really develops as you get into it. The relationship that develops between Hunter and his newly-discovered daughter Chloe is the heart as well as the edge of the show. Each character has a great deal of maturing to do, and the comedy comes as much from their immaturity as from how frequently the viewer is encouraged to look down upon them and see the room for growth, and unlike Archie Bunker, always back to the same as each new episode starts, the characters seem to gradually improve from episode to episode. Except for Suzanne, she seems to get worse as episodes go on. She came across as the most mature with the first episode, and the show parallels her degeneration, or its revelation of how immature she is, further and further as Hunter tries to be a better father for Chloe. This show isn't likely to make it through the entire season, which is unfortunate. Alan Ball has created a comedy about more than just silly antics. While that isn't new, it is certainly handled in a unique, refreshing, and funny way.

This show was terrible! I don't know why it was even aired. It is an example of how some new tv shows are seriously declining in quality. When I heard it was cancelled I was relieved that there is room for a possibly good quality tv show.

Strangely, this series tried too hard and not hard enough at the same time: too hard by trying to assemble yet another quirky cast of youngish actors in yet another communal living situation, and not hard enough because the writing and performances were positively excruciating. Maybe with good material the cast would have come across better, but I doubt it, given the rarity with which any one of them exhibited any kind of talent for comic delivery or any ability to make their characters likable. Yet another failure from the network (ABC) that tried to replace "Sports Night" with "Talk to Me" and now shows the soon-to-be-short-lived "Geena Davis Show" in that same time slot. At least they came to their senses about this particular series that should never have made it past the script stage.