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Critic Reviews
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A show that offers few laughs and just as much entertainment.
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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.
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Less charitably, it's as if CBS has been sucked into a time warp -- delivering the fourth best sitcom of the 1989 season.
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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.
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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.
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It’s a very traditional and very safe sitcom.
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The show is well-staged; it’s just that there’s not much of a show.
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There is something wrong with the most popular and prosperous broadcast network churning out work that is this witless and lifeless.
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Neither [Man With a Plan or The Great Indoors] is groundbreaking or particularly exciting; both are quite likable and solidly constructed.
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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.
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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.
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This is one of the least authentic family sitcoms on TV, right down to the horrible home set, which looks like it was cribbed from the scraps of canceled shows.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A wan, weary network-sitcom-by-committee--oh, and Matt LeBlanc, too.
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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.”
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Oct 20, 2016It’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).
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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.
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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.
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The writers deliver a stale idea.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 18 out of 44
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Mixed: 4 out of 44
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Negative: 22 out of 44
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Nov 25, 2016
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Oct 27, 2016
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Oct 25, 2016