The Goldbergs

When The Goldbergs sticks to its loud, abrasive but loving family, it's fine. It's when it switches its focus to the '80s, complete with a voice-over designed to point out every difference between that decade and our own, that it gets into trouble.

Noisy, silly, occasionally obnoxious, sporadically funny and ultimately sweet.

The Goldbergs is funnier because the jokes are better but also because it is more credible [than "Mom"].

The adult cast is superb... but it feels as if the young actor playing Adam (Sean Giambrone) might have been kidnapped from a more conventional TV family.

The show has its amusing moments, though not from an abundance of 1980s nostalgia clips (“The Karate Kid,” “Knight Rider,” “ALF,” “Different Strokes” and “Back to the Future” all whiz by on screen) and music cues. The humor comes from the characters and their relationships.

Garlin and McLendon-­Covey are believable as variations of “That ’70s Show’s” parents, and Gentile’s Jan Brady-style meltdowns are amusing. But Adam’s obsession with female breasts, encouraged by his grandfather “Pops” (George Segal), is creepy, considering the actor looks about 9.

The Goldbergs is far from terrible—it just needs to learn how to mix the quirky dysfunction with the heartwarming moments in the style of shows like Malcolm In The Middle or Raising Hope.

The Goldbergs is amusing in fits and spurts before ending on several sweet notes--including REO Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight This Feeling.”

The comedy on The Goldbergs is loud, aggressive, and somewhat abrasive.

It has its strengths--most of them derived from the skilled cast--but none related to any capacity for originality.

The Goldbergs banks on nostalgia for its charm, but needs to build on something more for us to really care about this family.

What it needs to make it a lasting family comedy and not a VH1 special is heart and a sense of its characters as individuals. It shows signs of the former, but the latter gets lost in the deafeningly loud pilot and the pop-culture-reference humor.

So far so generic, and I'll decide later once my ears stop ringing.

The characters are all broad types, the '80s references (Gobots, Sam Goody, an REO Speedwagon singalong) mostly feel shoehorned in rather than creating the feeling of the era, and the hostility of the family doesn't turn out to be great fodder for humor.

It is nice but overly familiar in its reliance on pop-culture signposts and snuggly sentimentality. [30 Sep 2013, p.53]

The Goldbergs's ostensibly endearing premise is sadly also its biggest flaw. Goldberg's on-screen representation as prepubescent Adam (Sean Giambrone) fails to complement the voiceover narration and meaningful asides of adult Adam (Patton Oswalt) in any substantial way.

There are a few lively moments--Barry flipping out when he thinks his mom gave him car keys for his birthday when it's really a locket with her picture in it; a montage that collects dad's malapropisms, the better to teach viewers "How to speak Murray"--but it's all too strained, too obviously written, and too dependent on the sort of easy-laughs memory-lane-tripping that VH1 did to death about fifteen years ago.

For all that it springs from original material--a coda to the pilot shows some of the actual home movies, which are indeed hilarious--The Goldbergs--is all style and no substance.

There are some sharp jokes here, but they get lost in the bile. The Goldbergs is like The Wonder Years infected by Married... With Children. It's a half hour of annoying people yelling at one another.

As fertile as the mid-1980s are for comedy, however, the pilot is too often grating--with a little of Garlin, in particular, going a long way.

It rapidly turns into a prolonged, nearly laughless sketch about domestic life in the Pac-Man era.

The characters and mishaps on The Goldbergs are predicable, and the writing isn’t clever enough to overcome clichés.

The Goldbergs has a solid adult cast, but the whole thing leans heavily on broad humor and cartoonish moments--and did I mention that it's LOUD.

It’s not just that they’re caricatures, or that even the most prominent piece of ’80s music used in the pilot makes you wince. It’s the way every move and sentence feels like the easiest path to predictable gags.