Extended Family 2024 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
Jim (Jon Cryer) and Julia (Abigail Spencer) were married for 17 years, and they had 2 kids — Grace (Sofia Campana) and Jimmy Jr. (Finn Sweeney), but they got divorced about a year ago. As they tell someone off-camera, they feel they’ve set the example for amicable divorces; they even had a “reverse wedding” where they rip up their vows and walk out of the church backwards. They each live at “the nest” when it’s their week with the kids, and the other spouse lives elsewhere.
But Jim hasn’t quite cut the cord with Julia left; when he discovers that the goldfish they gave Grace when they got divorced is dead, he tries to cover things up. The first thing he does is call his father Bobby (Lenny Clarke), who comes clean that he lied to Jim about their pet cat’s death 40 years prior. Then Jim uses Find My Phone to track down Julia, who is on a date with Trey Taylor (Donald Faison).
Oh, yeah, Trey. Julia met Trey, the owner of the Boston Celtics, shortly after the divorce. Julia is a crisis manager, and Trey hired her to help him dig out of a situation where he made a highly controversial public remark about “red-headed stepchildren.” Their relationship has advanced to the point where they’re engaged, and Trey weighs in on Goldfishgate. While Jim and Julia, still vibing with their inside jokes, agree that they should cover things up, Trey thinks they should tell Grace the truth.
But Grace’s reaction about the fish isn’t really about the fish, it’s about how her parents feel like they won the whole divorce thing, even though no one consulted her about it.
Extended Family is an example of a sitcom that just doesn’t work, despite all of the talent and experience in front of and behind the camera. We watched the first three episodes, which NBC made available for review, and while the third episode was incrementally better than the first, it still elicited only a chuckle. And that chuckle was more of a laugh than we had in the first two episodes.
O’Malley did base the premise on the relationship the real owner of the Celtics (Wyc Grousbeck) and his wife has with her ex-husband. So it’s not like the situation is outlandish. But the first episode is so disjointed, with the inexplicable trope of the main characters talking to the camera, to the silly flashbacks, to just the insanely tired plot of Jim trying to hide the fact that he killed his daughter’s goldfish — did we mention that Grace was 13 and not 6? — that we wondered if it had been rushed through after the strikes were over (apparently not; the show had about half a season in the can before the writers’ strike started last spring).
The dialogue is way too fast in certain places, and whatever gags there are in some of those monologues don’t get a chance to breathe. Clarke, as funny as he is, is completely miscast as Cryer’s dad; it’s not even the actors’ relative closeness in age, but it’s the fact that there is no way Cryer’s perpetually-agitated character Jim was raised by the seemingly unbothered Bobby.
Cryer and Faison are, of course, sitcom veterans, and they both fit comfortably into their respective roles. However — and this is not the fault of Cryer — it feels like Jim at times gets off-the-rails crazy about the “rules” of the arrangement he has with Julia, indicating that he isn’t 100 percent OK with the fact that she and Trey got so serious so fast. But instead of having him just say that, O’Malley and his writers would rather have him act like an irrational lunatic at times.
Then there’s Spencer, who has been reliably excellent but has very little experience on multicamera sitcoms, and it shows. She overplays most of her gags, with wild gestures and line deliveries that give us the impression that she thinks that the format doesn’t favor the usual subtleties she brings to her roles.
