Man With a Plan

It’s a shopworn premise to be sure, but the delivery system overcomes much of that. LeBlanc fine-tunes his doofus Joey persona and smoothly rolls with it at home, at school and in the workplace he shares with older brother Don (a serviceable Kevin Nealon).

It’s a very traditional and very safe sitcom.

A show that offers few laughs and just as much entertainment.

Man with a Plan just makes you wish he’d take his sincere befuddlement elsewhere, someplace that mattered. Simply put, Matt LeBlanc is too good to be this irrelevant.

A wan, weary network-sitcom-by-committee--oh, and Matt LeBlanc, too.

The writers deliver a stale idea.

It is by no means a great sitcom out of the gate, and it’s about 8 billion light-years away from anything that could be described as cable-y. But there are worse ways to spend a half-hour.

After the pilot, Man With a Plan dials back the concept. All that leaves, though, is a standard extended-family sitcom. The characters are too generic to make that work.

The show is well-staged; it’s just that there’s not much of a show.

LeBlanc is a talented comedian—his Episodes, which will wind up a five-season run on Showtime early next year, is the most scabrously funny Hollywood self-examination ever—but there's no way he could have saved this generic, mailed-in show, in which the tepidity of the jokes is exceeded only by the depth to which they're driven into the ground.

LeBlanc is on Joey autopilot here, sometimes landing a punchline with his well-honed comic timing, but more frequently unable to commit to exactly how dumb Adam is supposed to be, an obliviousness that varies by scene.

As far as comfortable, mediocre family sitcoms go, Man with a Plan appears to be finding a nice groove, establishing a patter between easy stereotypes and incrementally encouraging Adam to grow.

Man with a Plan is unable to render its primary characters’ internal frustrations or anxieties as anything other than an engine for tired sitcom plots.

There is something wrong with the most popular and prosperous broadcast network churning out work that is this witless and lifeless.

Chemistry wasn’t the problem with either version of the pilot. Indeed both actresses are fine in the role, as is LeBlanc; it’s the show itself that could use some work.

Less charitably, it's as if CBS has been sucked into a time warp -- delivering the fourth best sitcom of the 1989 season.

Uninspired, obvious and just not that humorous, there’s little reason to make a plan to watch CBS’s latest in a string of disappointing new sitcoms.

Man with a Plan is not a good show, even by low sitcom standards, and far away from the effective multi-cam format CBS has become used to employing in its massive hit lineup.

Not only is the series uncomfortably dated and anti-equality, but it’s also criminally unfunny. The canned laughter is almost entirely unearned and usually revolves around predictable wordplay instead of, you know, jokes.

The show places a tremendous amount of faith in LeBlanc, but in spite of the occasional flash of Joey Tribbiani panache, he’s always outshone by Snyder, Nealon, or the analogy-loving dialogue of husband-and-wife creators Jeff and Jackie Filgo.

There are opportunities here for something more interesting than what develops, which is laced with needlessly crass jokes (and no real humor), but Man with a Plan clearly has no plans to explore that.

The whole enterprise just feels very phoned-in. LeBlanc appears mostly disinterested during his scenes, and the script doesn’t bother to give Adam any character traits beyond “a slightly less dumb version of Joey.”

Imagine that this particleboard sitcom is in fact part of a lost season of Showtime’s “Episodes,” in which “Matt LeBlanc” (played by LeBlanc, in a nicely meta turn) winds up landing yet another sitcom that exists mainly to employ actors, writers and producers--and thus consciously squanders all the critical goodwill he gained by playing a version of himself on an ironic premium cable comedy.