Muddling Through

Connie Drego (Stephanie Hodge) returns to Drego's Oasis in rural Michigan, a road side stop and cabins, after more than two years in prison. She had accidentally shot her cheating husband Sonny in the butt. Her oldest daughter Madeline (Jennifer Aniston) has been running the business while she's away and got married to Duane Cooper who was the arresting police officer in her case. In the mean time, the younger daughter Kerri has become rebellious. She divorced Sonny but he's still living in one of the cabins.

This Aniston sitcom aired over the summer right before Friends. It's a functional network sitcom with no particularly outstanding aspect. It has a few laughs although the laugh track would say otherwise. Stephanie Hodge doesn't project the big personality that is needed to lead. She seems fine as a sitcom wife but this role needs to be bigger. Everything is fine but none of it is big enough. It's a by-the-book sitcom with not enough juice. It's just as well as both Aniston and Hodge would go on to do bigger things. The most notable thing for television history may be that Aniston was filming this at the same time as Friends. If this show had been picked up, she would had to leave Friends due to contractual obligations.

Before Jennifer Aniston was Rachel Greene in the mega-hit, Friends, she was working and doing a series like Muddling Through about a daughter of a paroled convict played perfectly by Stephanie Faracy. Sadly, this show even if Aniston had left to do Friends could have found an audience. I love rural and blue collar comedies. I actually think her character was better here as the daughter playing mother. In Friends, she played spoiled Rachel. This show wasn't bad but it wasn't as memorable as it could have been. Faracy was perfect as Aniston's mother. The story about a female paroled convict returning home to live with her daughter and her son-in-law is plausible. I guess networks don't care for shows about blue collar and rural comedies. It's a shame too.

This show never got much of a chance to succeed. Stephanie Hodge starred after "Nurses" and before "Unhappily Ever After." This sat on the shelf for a while, though, and by the time it was dropped into the schedule during the summer, most everyone involved had moved on. Hodge was soon to do "Unhappily," and Jennifer Aniston started "Friends" that fall. It's really a shame, because "Muddling" wasn't half bad as unheralded, small-net sitcoms go. Hodge played a white-trash ex-con released after a shortish prison sentence received for shooting her husband in the butt. Unfortunately, after she got out, he was back in her life. Her daughter (Aniston) and son-in-law were also around to complicate her life. The show was, as I said, non-terrible, and if I remember correctly, the ratings were decent. They weren't decent enough, however, to give the show a future.