Growing Up Fisher

Mel Fisher (J.K. Simmons) is a blind lawyer who often tries to pass. He is divorcing his wife Joyce (Jenna Elfman). Their kids Henry (Eli Baker) and Katie (Ava Deluca-Verley) have to deal with the divorce and their unique family. The show also gets into Henry's best friend Runyen (Lance Lim).

This show started awkwardly with blind Mel passing for seeing. It's filled with stories from writer's life with his blind dad. Even though it may be real, it just sounds fake without being funny. Then there is Jenna Elfman. I don't want to be mean but she's too young and hot for Simmons. I love the guy but Jenna looks 30s even although she's in her 40s. Also the divorce is possibly the nicest one around. It feels like a lot of rough edges got rounded out. The kids are fine and the best character has to be the best friend Runyen. He's the funniest one in the whole cast. This is a functional network TV family sitcom. It's a mid season replacement show that got canceled after its half season run.

I absolutely love this show!I think it is very funny, interesting, engaging, and realistically family appropriate! I watched the whole season in 2 days. I am extremely disappointed that NBC cancelled it - that makes no sense. The critics seriously shouldn't have been that hard on this show - I think it is worth every penny and every effort NBC put into it. In fact, it was realistically the only thing I watched on NBC, so I guess with the discontinuation of this show, I won't be watching NBC anymore. I do think they should seriously consider bringing it back. GREAT SHOW! If you are looking for a new family show ( that might last you a week at max) or are just searching for new shows to watch, I highly, highly encourage you to look into this show. There may only be one season, but it will be well worth every minute you spend watching it.

We were pleased to see that NBC has tried a couple of new family centered series of which this is one and the other being About A Boy.

We think the star in this series will turn out to be young Henry (Eli Baker). He is a fresh young talent and we think he has great potential.

J.K. Simmons as Mel Fisher the Dad is an enjoyable character. It was especially nice to see how Henry listens to everything Dad says and there are many large underlying "teachable moments" in this first episode. Mel is a good Dad.

Jenna Elfman is someone we enjoy seeing anytime, and here in her role as Joyce she was true to type.

We enjoyed this episode and will tune in again next week.

Growing Up Fisher and About A Boy are a welcome relief from watching NCIS Los Angeles on that other network. That means it fills a time slot where the market is hungry for something new and in this case NBC did it.

Keep up the good work and we may tune in to NBC for more than Grimm.

"Are you sure you should be driving?" NBC is currently trying a couple of new family centered series of which this is one and the other being About A Boy. Unfortunately, the premise is relatively thin and the show quickly abuses the abilities of the protagonist, Mel Fisher. The premise revolves around Mel Fisher, a blind lawyer, who goes about his life fooling everyone into believing he can see. The protagonist can apparently chop down trees with a chainsaw, teach his daughter to parallel park, leap over other lawyers with a simple bound. The comedy would need to be irreverent and edu for this to have the slightest shot at success. 'instead, it goes for a sappy, feel-good vibe with a voice-over by Jason Bateman. Despite it being based on the creator's actual childhood, the element of truth doesn't make it any less absurd or any more worthy of being a TV show. Just as it's hard to keep up with how many failed sitcoms there have been during mid-seasons, I'm losing track of how many mawkish, barely funny sitcoms these days are drawn from the writer's own family experience and upbringing. Creatively, the story of Me is an awfully stifling place to start. Memoir has its place beyond the page, but sitcoms are usually not it - for the same reasons that family stories you think are so table-poundingly hilarious are difficult to convey to any audience larger than a dinner party. Network execs need to stop indulging this strange habit and ask writers and producers to look for pilot pitches someplace other than their home movies and photo albums: it just isn't funny. For these reasons Growing Up Fisher gets a 2/10.

The story is told from Henry Fisher's (Eli Baker) point of view. It uses the same grown-up main character narrating his (pre) adolescence in voice-over technique as The Wonder Years. Of course, this show is not as brilliantly inspired as Wonder Years, but it would be unfair to judge a new TV show by such high standards. Eli Baker has a lot of boyish charm and does a convincing job.

Nowadays, it feels a bit old fashioned to have a traditional family sitcom. It's true that the parents are divorced, but they have such a good relationship that there's not such a large difference.

Any new show needs a differentiating element, and here the Mel's (J.K. Simmons, playing the father) blindness plays that role.

One problem is that, for a comedy, Growing Up Fisher is not very funny. A lot of jokes are made from Mel's blindness and how he doesn't let that keep him from any activity. Some of those are enjoyable, but that premise only takes us so far.

Another problem is that it relies too much on clichés. Henry starts awkwardly noticing girls, which is a reasonable plot point for a protagonist this age but one we have often seen. Joyce (Jenna Elfman), his mother, has gone back to the university and is obsessed about being cool and being friends with the other students and with her teenage daughter and her friends. There's nothing wrong with her interpretation, but beyond this not too promising plot element she is not given much to work with. The same can be said about Katie (Ava Deluca-Verley), who plays Henry's older sister. She does fine, but is not given much to do. Henry's best friend Runyen (Lance Lim), is an Asian mouthy kid who also feels like a sitcom cliché.

The show is at his best with heart-warming family lessons, like when Katie stands up for his father when he is almost expelled from a musical where she is starring because his guide dog started barking. This came after Mel had told her that he was so obnoxious and outspoken because when he was a teen his rowing coach had not liked having a blind kid in the team and had asked him to leave. Mel had left and he had always regretted it. Katie standing up for him in spite of being mad at him for spoiling her date was a nice moment. I fear that in our cynic times such simple feel-good messages are seen as too corny.

It's a pity this show was cancelled so soon. I enjoyed it and felt that it had potential to grow beyond the clichés that were holding it back. Unfortunately, we won't have the opportunity to see whether that's the case.