Man With a Plan

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.