About A Boy

Solid writing and even sharper delivery (all without an intrusive laugh track) make this one of the season’s upper tier freshman comedies.

Overall, it’s a whole lot of premise-setting and foundation-building, but there’s enough here to be optimistic that this will be one more tick in the Good column of movie/TV synergy.

He [David Walton] and About a Boy are at its best in those disarming moments when Will lets down his guard and faces his grown-up responsibilities to teach Marcus how to enjoy the "total exuberance" of boyhood.

Both shows ["About a Boy" and "Growing Up Fisher"] are well written and actually quite engaging, but what is most interesting is the focus on the brighter side of splitting up. It’s a new genre of heartwarming family show.

Walton and Stockham are a seamless comedy team straight out of the gate. Their banter is more salty and cynical than sappy, but that’s how it gets to you.

Two sweet, funny, even poignant dramedies ["About a Boy" and "Growing up Fisher"] launch on NBC this weekend, both helping midseason feel richer than the meager offerings of the network's fall slate.

About a Boy is an utterly charming pilot, and almost certainly the most endearing half-hour NBC has developed in some time.

It's familiar enough territory, to be sure, yet it's covered in lively fashion, thanks mostly to Katims' breezy script and the delightful comic chemistry between Walton and young Stockham.

The show is funny, warm and bloody irresistible because of the care taken with creating characters who are multidimensional, vulnerable and credible.

An eccentric kid (Benjamin Stockham, “1600 Penn”) looking for a father figure finds one in his man-child neighbor, Will, played with the right amount of humor and heart by David Walton (“Bent”).

With Jason Katims (Friday Night Lights, Parenthood) as creator and producer, About a Boy could very well be the next universally appealing family show.

The cast is very good and if the central relationships are beefed up, it could be a keeper.

Driver's at her funniest in scenes where she and Marcus revel in their oddness, but "About a Boy" left me less sure of who Marcus is: He veers between painful naivete and canny opportunism with alarming speed.

It’s sweet but not syrupy. The pilot is so beautifully written and acted that it’s difficult to offer any kind of resistance, flaws and all.

When the writers nail the truisms--Madrigal’s character says he hasn’t seen a movie since 2008, and when Andy and his wife, Laurie (Annie Mumolo), get a couple of free hours to ostensibly have sex, they choose instead to catch up on Homeland--the series really clicks.... Where About a Boy suffers is when the storytelling gets a little too saccharine in the Will-Marcus friendship.

Will is so apparently happy that most of the pathos inherent in his arrested development will have to be supplied by the viewer. But there is uplift in the theme. A man whose life is passing him by has a chance to stop being useless and search for the origins of true joy--and a little child shall lead him. Even if there are not too many creative surprises here, it's a journey that never loses its appeal.

Produced by Jason Katims ("Friday Night Lights," "Parenthood"), About a Boy is snappy with some well-observed one-liners, but it's a fairly conventional sitcom about an unconventional family.

Boy is often silly, but this cast is just so likable.

Walton’s Will is more jovial and goofy, a ladies’ man with at least one good and honest friend his own age in Andy. He’s also the primary reason to give NBC’s About a Boy any sort of chance to develop its formula.

The show is a sweetened, Americanized version of the 2002 film of the same name starring Hugh Grant, which was itself adapted from Nick Hornby's 1998 novel.

Cute and occasionally touching, About a Boy gets no points in its early episodes for originality or expanding the single-camera comedy form but it's a decent little show about flawed but essentially decent characters.

It's not a terrible show, but it's a fairly literal, toothless translation of the source material that doesn't give much indication of working as an ongoing series.

About a Boy yearns to be good. Yet it relishes being bad. And Katims--guiding hand to "Parenthood" and "Friday Night Lights"--doesn't fess up to that dichotomy.

There are a handful of lines in every episode that are worth a smile or two (as well as a celebrity cameo in episode two that works surprisingly well in this regard), and the acting is largely solid (though everyone seems to be in different shows). But there’s a serious lack of a core to About A Boy.

The premiere has moments of clever insight into the dating process and how parenthood can change you but the show spins its wheels for the next two episodes sent for press.

This About a Boy is as subtle as a chain saw.

To be clear, the problem isn't that Will is in some general sense unlikable, it's that About a Boy rigs the show so that you have no choice but to think of him as a liberating life force who's adorable and ultimately admirable.