'Grandfathered': A Good Work-In-Progress
Last week, Grandfathered secured its full-season renewal, and now its work begins. Or, rather, continues: With each episode that’s aired thus far, you can almost hear the hammering and plastering being done to get this show in good working order. It’s building on a solid foundation: a talented cast with a promisingly elastic premise. Playing off the smooth planes of star John Stamos’ face, Grandfathered follows his middle-aged playboy-restaurateur Jimmy Martino as he adapts to the sudden discovery that he has a son, Gerald (played by Josh Peck) and a toddler granddaughter. The idea of deploying Stamos’ natural charm in the service of a comic meditation on the ego-deflating difficulties of aging and responsibility — that’s the stuff upon which a sitcom can be sustained into syndication, if it’s done right.
Ah, but how to do it right? Over these first few weeks, you could see Grandfathered trying out different angles, varying emphases. Would the show be more of a workplace comedy, focused primarily on the surrogate family in the restaurant called Jimmy’s? Would the show decide to emphasize its younger-than-Stamos stars Peck and his girlfriend, played by Christina Milian? Or would Grandfathered turn out to be something else entirely: a slow-burn romance between Jimmy and Paget Brewster’s Sara — Jimmy’s ex-girlfriend and mother of Gerald, who’s now re-entering his life?
Tonight’s episode is, I’m afraid, not the edition to hold up as a blueprint going forward. Titled “Edie’s Two Dads,” it concerns an effort to get little Edie into an elite day-care center. Somewhere early on in the half-hour, Jimmy gets the idea that he’ll have a better chance of gaining his granddaughter’s admission if he allows the woman interviewing him (guest star Joanna Garcia Swisher, always a welcome presence wherever she pops up) to think that he and Gerald are a committed gay couple.
The premise turns into an icky, even retrograde, plot, leading to scenes like Jimmy trying to get Gerald to kiss him on the lips to prove to the school’s officials that they really are romantically involved; the laughs are supposed to come from father and son’s revulsion at this idea. The result is not quite “vile and offensive,” as the head of the school characterizes Jimmy’s scheme, but it comes close.
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No, if Grandfathered is to remain a going concern, I’d like to see it emphasize its strengths. Paget Brewster could be the glue here; her Sara gets laughs by being the no-bull realist in the midst of dreamers (Jimmy fooling himself that he’ll be eternally young; Gerald clinging to his man-boy, wounded-grown-child status). Sara has the best, closest, most emotionally true relationships with Jimmy and Gerald, and Brewster is the cast member most adept at this kind of comedy, looking at and listening to everyone and really reacting to what they’re saying, rather than just waiting to deliver her next punchline. (Indeed, the biggest laughs in “Edie’s Two Dads” are tucked into Sara’s subplot, in her reactions as she visits the way-more-downscale old day-care center she put Gerald in when she was a struggling single-mom, and now sees that it was a mini-house-of-horrors.)
If Grandfathered could start to construct a show in which a father, a son, and a woman who’s brought both into adulthood begin to re-shape their lives a little each week, with good jokes, Grandfathered could actually turn into something special.
Grandfathered airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. on Fox.
