- Network: ABC
- Series Premiere Date: Jun 20, 2010
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Critic Reviews
- Critic score
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Scoundrels is wicked fun when the Wests are being wild.
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Some of the comedy--which arises from the situations, not jokes--is good. So is the drama. Whether they'll work together as the show moves forward remains to be seen.
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I would have preferred the whole crime family thing, but there could be some good laughs as the family attempts to work at legit jobs. It probably won't be as funny as breaking-and-entering, but I'll give it two more weeks to decide whether good will be good--or bad.
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Bland, with no pop or energy, Scoundrels limps sadly along.
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As for Scoundrels, it is, like its characters, far from perfect, but probably far better than you expected from a scripted network show in the summer.
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Watching how the Wests attempt to navigate the straight and narrow could be hilarious.
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There's nothing really wrong with Scoundrels, but it's just hard to see what's special about it, either.
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Scoundrels at least can brag about a good performance from a fine actress, Virginia Madsen, though....It's hard to care about Cheryl's efforts to save her children when the kids are so dull, and hard to care about her marriage when her husband appears to be badly miscast.
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Virginia Madsen cuts a fine figure as the matriarch trying to hold her family of four kids together while their dad goes to prison, but the fanciful tone makes the show a little too pastel-colored when a bolder palette would seem to be required.
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Not a single one of the characters were funny enough, or touching enough, to make me want to see more of them. If the Wests were thrown in jail, I'd be tempted to throw away the key.
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The problem is that Scoundrels is never as funny as it thinks it is.
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Whether the show can figure out what to do with Madsen's semi-reformed brood is the challenge. Right now the show feels less like FX's recent, underrated The Riches than Brothers & Sisters set among the criminal element.
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Most of the screen time goes to Ms. Madsen, and she works hard to pump some life into the script's mild zingers.
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It's hard to say how the series will play out because by the end of the first episode Mom has declared that the family is going straight. In this, I hope they fail.
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I'm sure the writers have big plans to examine the hilarious pitfalls everyone encounters after Wolf goes to jail and Cheryl institutes a new "no crime" rule but it's not just difficult to care about what happens next, it's difficult to imagine caring.
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Charmless and predictable, Scoundrels seems like a tepid rehash of The Riches, a lively and thoughtful FX show about a family of gypsy thieves trying to go straight that was done in by the 2008 television strike.
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Scoundrels, at 9 p.m., and The Gates, at 10, may not be exactly the stuff you can't wait another week for, but both are watchable and fun, part of a big ABC effort to put something new, if not original, on the air most nights this summer.
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Scoundrels seems less concerned with how it sets up the rest of the series than with the laughs it hopes that setup will engender....Still, Scoundrels isn't all sitcom setups and repartee. At several points, just when we think we have one of the Wests safely caricatured, he or she will do something that surprises us.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 8 out of 19
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Mixed: 2 out of 19
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Negative: 9 out of 19
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VBJun 21, 2010
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erocserocsJun 21, 2010Bad acting and bad writing means couldn't watch till the end.