Will the Egregious 'Extended Family' End the Traditional Multicam Sitcom For Good? (Frankel)

Perhaps the most popular, proliferate, enduring  and uniquely American of all entertainment formats, the traditional multi-camera family sitcom has been chased to near extinction, whittled to only a few time-period blocks on the current, post-strike midseason schedules of the major broadcast networks.

Those that survive are mostly spinoffs and reboots of proven half-hour shows, notably NBC's successful Night Court, ABC's The Conners and Paramount's surprisingly spry Frasier.

So it was a bit surprising when NBC went back to the old traditional family comedy well when it recently ditched niche-popular single-camera shows American Auto and Grand Crew for Extended Family, which now leads out of Night Court at 8:30 p.m on Tuesdays, with episodes debuting on Peacock the following day.

Also read: ‘Extended Family’ Review: Jon Cryer’s Return To Sitcoms Has a Familiar Appeal

Extended Family boasts a modern twist -- a divorced Boston couple trying to stay close to each other for the sake of the kids, the matriarch's new paramour tightly but often-times awkwardly integrated into the milieu.

But NBC and its production partner, Lionsgate, doubled down on traditional 2000s-era comfort, enlisting Mike O'Malley, who acted as Jimmy Hughes' on CBS' Yes, Dear for six seasons during the aughts, to create and show-run the series, with the now-completely-bald Jon Cryer, to an almost total degree, reprising his sad-sack ex-husband role from CBS aughts-era mega-hit Two and a Half Men.

Donald Faison, who played whimsical over-achiever surgeon Dr. Christopher Turk on NBC buddy comedy Scrubs from 2001-2010, is cast as the over-achieving yet whimsical owner of the NBA's Boston Celtics, and new love interest of Cryer's ex-wife, played by journey-woman, jet-black-tressed actress Abigail Spencer.

There's an attempt at Modern Family-esque narrative edginess, with interstitials featuring the characters situated on a couch, briefly interrupting the story to address the audience more directly. This single-cam story-telling scheme mixes awkwardly with Extended Family's laugh track.

Also read: ‘Young Sheldon’ Rides ‘Suits’-Like Dual-Platform Approach to Streaming Success

"With the initial success of the Night Court reboot and the cancelation of the ostensibly edgier or more niche — some, like me, might say 'better,' but to each their own — American Auto and Grand Crew, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for NBC to think that the way forward is broader and more traditional comedies," wrote critic Daniel Fienberg, reviewing Extended Family for the Penske showbiz trades.

Based on the results, it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that any network will ever try the multi-cam family sitcom thing again, at least not with all new IP and characters.

A longtime patron of the traditional sitcom arts, I performed an extended binge through each of the first three episodes of Extended Family on Peacock Wednesday. And I can say with total candor -- as a former marketing employee of The "Dubba Dubba" WB in the mid-1990s, who by job requirement also had to monitor Homeboys in Outer Space, The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer and other unfathomably bad sitcom stylings of the rival UPN network at the time -- Extended Family doesn't work. Not on any level.

The jokes aren't funny. The characters aren't interesting. The story arcs are mundane, lacking any broader, higher calling. The acting is flat. Not to harsh on the young actors, Finn Sweeney and Sophia Cappana, but as Two and a Half Men mastermind Chuck Lorre himself has said, upping the game of child stars beyond what seems like mere dissertation of the dialog is one of the unsung challenges in this family sitcom gambit, and O'Malley so far doesn't seem up to the task.

As the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review's Rob Owen wrote, "Despite game efforts by Jon Cryer and Donald Faison, Extended Family is the kind of sitcom that gives multi-cam comedies a bad name."

More on the reviews in a second, but first the ratings:

Fueled by Cryer and Faison's solid past comedic performances -- but undoubtedly more so by the lead-out of NBC's coverage of a playoff-position-deciding game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Cincinnati Bengals -- a sneak peak of the Extended Family pilot on Saturday, Dec. 23 generated an impressive 4.7 million viewers and outstanding-by-today-standards 0.9 audience share, according to Nielsen data compiled by another Penske pub, TVLine. (NBC would not provide Nielsen ratings data for this article.)

Debuting in its regular Tuesday time slot on Jan. 2, episode 2 scored a 3.3 rating/.03, more pedestrian, as expected, without the NFL lead-in, while maintaining a decent chunk of Night Court's 3.7/0.4 share.

But a market correction seems to have just occurred. This past Tuesday (Jan. 9), episode 3 of Extended Family -- which features Cryer and Faison repeatedly fist-bumping over their mutual love of Swedish murder mysteries, while Spencer panics over son Sweeney's obsession with violent video games -- averaged only a 2.7/0.3, an 18% bleed-out of the Night Court lead-in.

Reviews have been scant, with Penke's THR, Decider, The Wall Street Journal and The Daily Beast weighing in ... and laying up a bit (the latter called it "so-so"), perhaps cognizant that comedy series often need half a season or more to find their legs.

This Thing Goes (Down) to 11

But I do not foresee "legs" sprouting anytime soon here. Just peruse Extended Family's viewer takes on the social internet, with the Rotten Tomatoes tabulating an impossibly low aggregated audience score of just 11%. Of 30 viewer reviews on IMDB, meanwhile, only two watchers scored the the show above a "5" on the platform's 1-10 scale, with 13 viewers ranking it as a "2" or less.

"Unfunny, forced acting, boring story. I am surprised this even got green lit by a studio head. I would have halted this trash at the script stage," read one IMDB reviewer.

The mean missives of the social internet aside, I obviously share this consternation. Still, why make a big deal about what amounts to another bad sitcom being thrown against the wall ... amid decades of bad sitcom ideas thrown against the wall?

With the flame of an adored American institution whittled down to perhaps just one more opportunity, NBCUniversal somehow came up ... with this.

Why with perhaps only one "at-bat" left for the tired genre, was the Last Original Family Sitcom put in the hands of O'Malley, a popular, prolific journeyman performer, who has plenty of experience acting on half-hour comedies, but who has more recently cut his writing teeth as a creator/show-runner on the Starz dramas Survivor's Remorse and Heels? Sure, the acclaimed Survivor's Remorse had comedic elements, but hourlong premium cable comedy is a long way away from managing the writers room for a half-hour broadcast network "laffer."

Full disclosure: I've had numerous, often tense interactions with O'Malley personally through Los Angeles-area youth sports channels. (We coached, and our kids played in the same PONY baseball league a few years back.) He might be an adept manager of Hollywood productions, as Lionsgate's sustained trust in him seems to reveal. But I never once heard him utter, or witnessed him write, a single funny sentence.

So why turn to O'Malley for this comedic job when there seem to be a number of available veteran sitcom heavy hitters with proven network comedy track records, who are venturing into edgier streaming fare only because they've been told the ol'  populist half-hour network comedy factory is now shut down?

If you want a modern twist on the family comedy, why not instead turn to Modern Family co-creator Steven Levitan, whose fabulous and tragically overlooked Hulu comedy Reboot was cancelled after just eight episodes in the fall of 2022?

Or how about the heaviest hitter of the modern family sitcom era of all, Lorre, who is winding down Young Sheldon on CBS and is now showrunning edgier fare for premium cable/streaming? Lorre's very solid Bookie just got picked up for season 2 by HBO.

Update: Shortly after this story was filed, the Penske trades reported that Lorre is in development on a multi-cam Young Sheldon spinoff for CBS. Happily, that undermines our story premise.