‘Primo’ Is a Feel-Good, Coming-of-Age Comedy for the Whole Family
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Rafa Gonzales, the protagonist of the exceedingly likable new family comedy Primo, lives in San Antonio with his mother, Drea. Their modest ranch house should be more than enough for the two of them, if it weren’t for the fact that all five of Drea’s loud, opinionated, intrusive, knucklehead brothers are constantly there. When a new friend asks Rafa what it’s like having so many uncles around all the time, he suggests, “It’s like being inside a cloud of bees — except the bees are always, like, cussing, and punching each other.”
Across its eight-episode debut season, Primo ably demonstrates the many downsides of being inside that cloud, but also the appealing benefits of having so many people up in Rafa’s business, even if their help is counter-productive at least half the time.
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Primo was created by writer and beloved internet presence Shea Serrano, and produced by him and a group of sitcom veterans, most notably Michael Schur (Parks and Rec, The Good Place, Brooklyn Nine-Nine). The series operates along two tracks that frequently intersect. One is a sweet and charming coming-of-age story about Rafa (played by Ignacio Diaz-Silverio) as he enters his junior year of high school and discovers that he could be the first member of his family to go to college, much to the delight of Drea (Christina Vidal). The other is a broad and silly comedy about the antics of the five uncles: Jay (Jonathan Medina), who runs a sprinkler installation business and is seemingly more level-headed than his younger brothers, but only seemingly; Mondo (Efraín Villa), who seems perpetually baked and is more interested in cosmic and spiritual ephemera than finding a place to live; Rollie (Johnny Rey Diaz), an inveterate moocher who spends a lot of his nights in jail for getting into various forms of minor trouble; Mike (Henri Esteve), a military veteran; and Ryan (Carlos Santos), an assistant bank manager who insists that he was the first in the family to go to college, because he has a certificate for completing one class at a technical school. (He had to print out the certificate himself.) The show does an impressively efficient job of delineating one uncle from the next, not only in how they’re styled (Ryan has a droopy mustache, Mondo a thick beard, Rollie a goatee, etc.) but in their personalities and in the different ways in which they get things wrong.
The brothers are constantly battling one another for physical, intellectual, and/or emotional supremacy, even as it’s clear that Drea — who has been acting like their mom for decades because their own parents were barely in the picture — is the only one who actually knows what she’s doing most of the time. I say “most” because Serrano and company smartly find ways to let each of the six siblings have moments both low and high. The second episode, for instance, reveals that Drea is a horrifically bad self-taught cook — her quesadilla recipe somehow includes canned tuna, horseradish, and cinnamon — but remains oblivious because her brothers have lied to her for years while fixing the food behind her back. And while Jay has a wife, kids, and his own business, he also doesn’t trust banks and keeps all his cash in a complicated system of coat pockets in a hall closet at his house. (This backfires when he gives his daughter permission to go into the petty cash coat to buy from a passing ice cream truck, and she takes enough to purchase 500 Choco Tacos.) It’s a good balance that lets all the adults be funny at different times, in different ways, and keeps the conflicts from feeling repetitive. Everyone is likely to have one uncle they like best — for me, it was Jay, whose intense seriousness can be deployed to both scold his brothers and to point out the many ways he’s just as bad as them — even as the whole ensemble gels quickly.
Rafa, meanwhile, functions best as a straight man to his uncles. Diaz-Silverio is effective at conveying how embarrassing Rafa so often finds his family, but in a way that doesn’t undercut the more sincere moments. The plots focusing largely on Rafa and friends Miguel (Martin Martinez), Harris (Nigel Siwabessy), and Mya (Stakiah Washington) are gentler in their comedy, but still appealing. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before — you will be shocked to learn that over the course of the season, which spans Rafa’s entire junior year of high school, he struggles to tell Mya that he likes her as more than a friend — but done with enough specificity to feel lived-in. (Mya’s a military brat, for instance, which brings in various logistical and emotional complications.) But even though Rafa is the title character (everyone in the family calls him Primo), Drea and the uncles are very much the drawing card.
Way back in 2017, Serrano and Schur sold Primo to ABC, where it would have fit in nicely on a network that was home to a lot of similarly warm, goofy, multi-cultural family comedies like black-ish, The Goldbergs, Fresh Off the Boat, and Speechless. But TV shows can sometimes take a long and unexpected path from an idea — this one loosely based on Serrano’s own upbringing — to an actual series, so this one is finally here, but on Freevee, Amazon’s free ad-supported sister service. It was worth the wait.
All eight episodes of Primo Season One begin streaming May 19 on Freevee. I’ve seen the whole season.
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