Once in a while, a cast can transcend mediocre writing. It’s much harder to do in comedy than in drama, but when it happens, the material is elevated by good cast chemistry, as well as cast members who are experts at playing the characters they play. This is the case of a new comedy on Amazon Freevee.
DINNER WITH THE PARENTS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Initial shot: A car pulls up to a house at night and a man gets out with a neon green water gun.
The essence: David Langer (Henry Hall) is back home for the Langers’ traditional Friday night dinner. It’s the first time he’s been there in a long time because he was studying for his PhD. But he’s there for a good reason: he’s going to introduce his girlfriend Kristin (Anoushka Chadha) to his family.
However, the first order of business is to throw his younger brother Gregg (Daniel Thrasher), whom he calls “Whoopsie”, before Gregg catches him. Too late; The water gun is no match for Gregg’s Super Soaker.
David is warmly welcomed by his parents; Harvey (Dan Bakkedahl) is wearing the T-shirt with his face on it that his kids gave him as a joke gift and has his Al Pacino impression ready, and Jane (Michaela Watkins) thinks she hears wedding bells in David’s future. There’s also Jane’s mother, Nana (Carol Kane), who has a non-specific Eastern European accent and a natural ability to be inappropriate. Jane is making chicken wings since Kristin, a poet, is from Buffalo. She’s making some mild ones for Harney, who has some major problems with spicy foods.
However, a small problem occurs just before Kristin shows up; she FaceTimes David and breaks up with him. Unable to return home and confront her domineering family with the news, she spots a Postmates delivery girl named Destiny (Sarah Kameela Impey) and offers to pay her to impersonate Kristin.
Somehow, the ruse works for a while, although Destiny increases the amount she wants when she realizes how crazy the Langers are. Gregg is determined to prove that whoever this woman is, she is certainly not his brother’s girlfriend. To complicate matters, the Langers’ strange neighbor, Donnie (Jon Glaser), shows up looking for the “pitza” that Destiny was giving him. Nana gets trapped in her massage chair. Destiny then walks over to take a photo of David when he was a child and reveals that she is pregnant. Instead of being scared, Harvey and Jane are delighted. How long can David keep this up?
What shows will it remind you of? Dinner with parents It is based on the UK comedy Friday night dinnerand this version, created by Jon Beckerman, has a similar feel to Life in pieces (which may not be a coincidence It also had Bakkedahl in its cast).
Our opinion: The format of Dinner with parents is that in each episode the Langers will gather for a Friday night dinner, with various guests and non-guests, and things will go wrong quickly. In the second episode, Jane’s flashy sister Amy (Mircea Monroe) approaches and sends Jane into an uncertain frenzy that ends up sending her to the hospital. Harvey continues to bond with Amy’s husband Mitch (Karl Collins), and David and Gregg try to get the best of their wisecracking, idiotic cousin Chet (Kaine Zajaz).
Because of this format, the show is inconsistent, perhaps because almost every episode is more or less a bottle episode. Situations that are funny in the limited environment in which the series takes place work well and generate a lot of laughs, but not all situations work.
It’s a great cast, and Watkins, Bakkedahl, Glaser and Kane are especially adept at turning mildly funny material into laugh-out-loud moments. However, they all play types of characters we’ve seen them play in the past. The characters of Hall and Thrasher are somewhat more vague; Hall’s David is nerdy and academic, but he seems annoying most of the time and Thrasher’s Gregg plays a generic younger brother type who’s just there to annoy David.
None of the plots are particularly new, but that doesn’t matter as much when the character-based jokes arrive, which they do much better in the second episode than in the first. There’s a bit of confusion as to David’s age and how he gets back into the Friday night dinner routine if he really lives out of town. The Langers are Jewish (we see the children’s bar mitzvah portraits displayed prominently in the house), but their Friday night dinners seem nondenominational. And it really doesn’t seem like one crazy situation fuels the next.
All of this means that there’s a particular inconsistency in the writing that can drive you a little crazy if you’re not entertained by what the Langers are doing. But it seems like, most of the time, the show is fun enough to leave that lack of attention to detail on the back burner.
Sex and skin: In the second episode, Chet somehow manipulates David and Gregg into getting naked, and they run around the house chasing his cousin wearing their birthday suits.
Parting Shot: After Harvey vomits all over David’s sweater (he ate a spicy wing by mistake), Jane begins to take it off and asks, “So, is everyone having dinner next Friday?” David responds in an annoyed tone: “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.” But…isn’t he flying back to wherever he lives?
Sleeping star: Carol Kane is the sleeping star simply because she is Carol Kane.
Most pilot line: Nana tells Jane to “go to your room,” Jane of course says she’s an adult and that doesn’t work anymore. A back and forth ensues that actually becomes less fun the longer it lasts.
Our call: TRANSMIT IT. Dinner with parents is one of those shows that are elevated by the cast. Nothing in the show is particularly fresh or inventive, and some of the writing is infuriatingly inconsistent. But the cast manages to take the material and make it funny.
Joel Keller@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and technology, but make no mistake: he’s a couch potato. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
