Fam

The joy of Nina Dobrev's return to television screens is overshadowed by one of the most forced pilots I've ever seen. There is no original joke, the characters try to outdo each other more with shouting than with a good point, and by the end of the first twenty-minute episode, I wished the pilot had not been picked up by CBS for a full season. Nevertheless, I persevered with this family until the finale, and although it was not a glorious ending, paradoxically, better times started to shine through at the very end, which still never come. The script almost gives up on the character of Freddy played by the shamefully underused Gary Cole. The master of one-liners from Veep is degraded here to an aggregate of all police and father clichés, and it's a shame for someone like this. The surprisingly unappealing (and sadly stereotypical in comedic expression) Tone Bell eventually found some shared chemistry with Dobrev, but the main treasure lay surprisingly hidden in Shannon. Even though Odessa Adlon has to recite a lot of the obvious lines of an ordinary unruly teenager, she does so in such a genuine way that you cannot resist her. It is her clueless teenage girl that almost pushes the series to the boundary of a third star, and she probably would have gotten it there over time. But because of the extremely bad start, this is how we ended up. (19/06/2019)