Growing Up Fisher

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.

Baker's adorable, but it's Simmons, as the hilariously confident dad, who makes Henry's a childhood well worth exploring.

Growing Up Fisher is a winning, welcome example [of a family sitcom], conceptually novel and solidly cash. [24 Feb 2014, p.37]

The nutty parents in Growing Up Fisher do a good job of playing their extreme characters, instinctually making their eccentricities acceptable and funny rather than far-fetched and excessive. In contrast, the Growing Up Fisher children are so grounded and adult, but play that off with a world-weary-ness that is engaging.

Sometimes it's nice to have a fun, well-acted, pleasant sitcom both about and for the family.

Growing Up Fisher offers earnest, heartwarming stories about "a new kind of family," as ABC Family promos would call the divorced-but-still-friendly Fishers if the show aired on the basic cable network instead of NBC.

After a while it starts to feel a bit like “The Wonder Years,” with Baker in the role played by Fred Savage and Bateman as that show’s unseen narrator Daniel Stern, commenting sagely on how Mel and Joyce’s divorce has brought the family closer together in so many different ways. Still, Growing Up Fisher has potential, and Simmons tackles his role with good-natured authority, without descending into glibness.

Mel's eccentric independence is admirable and more often than not amusing--which isn't always the case for the show, which uses gentle but forced whimsy to deliver treacly life lessons from the perspective of preteen son Henry (Eli Baker).

Here's where you'll find the saccharine avoided by "About a Boy." You'll also find the occasional trite twist and labored comic turn. Still, Growing Up Fisher undeniably jumps to life when Simmons is on the screen, which is quite a lot. That's what gives this underdeveloped newcomer a fighting chance.

Growing Up Fisher is no About a Boy, although at times it’s not half-bad. The relationship between the freewheeling Mel and wide-eyed Henry has its sweet spots.... Elfman’s Joyce, however, is an all too typical blend of aging TV mom striving to be young, cool and alluring again. Her clashes with sour teen daughter Katie (Ava Deluca-Verley) tend to get old in a hurry.

Good-hearted and gentle, Fisher struggles on the "funny" front.

Growing Up Fisher is at once overdetermined and undercooked.

The writers try to imbue the narration with a sense of heartfelt nostalgia that came so naturally to a show like "The Wonder Years," but the contemporary setting and banal plotlines works against it.

Simmons does his usual solid work in this role, and he's got all the physical comedy in the playing blind (and faking sight) bits. Elfman makes another solid statement that she should be in something much better (this coming off her fine work in 1600 Penn; she hasn't lost any comedy chops). Together they're just undermined by, well, syrup.

Simmons, who was Juno’s dad and Brenda Leigh Johnson’s boss, is consistently funny and compelling, but the younger cast members haven’t settled into their roles yet, and the show doesn’t know what to do with them, anyway.

The creative failure of Growing Up Fisher is more distressing than the missteps of About a Boy because there would seem to be so much more potential there. These are characters that, in theory, you haven't seen before, but the show makes them feel too familiar.

The show seems a pale imitation of "The Goldbergs," the much funnier ABC show created by Adam F. Goldberg based on his own childhood.

Thanks to Fagerbakke and fellow supporting player Lance Lim—who provides Eli Baker’s awkward Henry with a smooth-operating sidekick—there’s a lot to laugh at on the fringes of Growing Up Fisher. If only the brood at the middle of this family comedy were as sharply defined.

Simmons is great as he always is, but between the divorce, the mid-life crisis, the coming out as blind, the mother-daughter tension and the boy discovering his true self and The Importance of Family, there is simply too much to look at and not enough to see.

The problem is, like "Sean Saves the World" and "The Michael J. Fox Show," this show is formulaic, slightly frantic and relies too much on unearned sentiment.

The premise, in other words, lacks heft, which leaves not much more than admiring Simmons--a highly versatile actor — as he does what he can with gags about his character’s insistence on doing things like driving and cutting down trees.

This miscast, tone-deaf family sitcom fails on multiple fronts, the biggest being J.K. Simmons’ nonsensical character: a lawyer and father of two who’s managed to hide his blindness from just about everyone.

I thought "About a Boy" was bad, but then I watched Growing Up Fisher and realized that things can always get worse.

On Growing Up Fisher, you don't root for Mel nearly as much as you wince for him.