And anyone who wanted an iconic actress playing a matriarch could have found one last season in Laurie Metcalf on “The McCarthys.” Or Margo Martindale on “The Millers.” Or Allison Janney, still garnering Emmy noms for “Mom.” “Better With You” did a better job of examining the various stages of relationships via one family “Love Bites” was a far superior example of interlocking mini storylines. But that montage could just as easily have been of shows that have been interred in the “Modern Family” Knockoff Memorial Mausoleum over the last eight years. “These slices of life that flash by, but they stay in your heart forever.” As he speaks, a montage flicks by of his three adult children and their relationships and families. “Life is about these moments, these pieces of time,” James Brolin intones near the end of CBS’ banal new series “Life in Pieces,” premiering Sept. And you have some serious trust to rebuild here.There’s really nothing as archaic, in the year 2015, as a sitcom that explicitly states its thesis. It’s a big world, and some father somewhere has possibly said to his son “Your sister tells me you’re a virgin,” or some precocious little girl, informed of the nonexistence of Santa Claus, has told her parents, “Up is down and down is up for me right now, I need some time alone. At the same time, there is something airless and artificial about the pilot. It’s solidly constructed and gives each actor a modicum of delightful moments - Wiest most of all. Three out of four have to do with sex in part, or with sexual parts the fourth is about the fleetingness and preciousness of life - a point Brolin’s character, who has thrown himself a funeral for his 70th birthday, makes explicitly, for those who didn’t notice on their own. Web series have shown us that you do not need long to tell a comical story, and Adler sets up his episodes-within-the-episode with efficiency, with just enough business between premise and punchline to suggest the bigger world that contains them. SIGN UP for the free Essential Arts & Culture newsletter > ![]() The roster is impressive: James Brolin, Dianne Wiest, Betsy Brandt, Dan Bakkedahl, Colin Hanks, Thomas Sadoski, Angelique Cabral, Zoe Lister-Jones - it might just as easily be the cast of the next Untitled Woody Allen Project. ![]() It’s set just around the point where a more whimsical “Parenthood” would meet a less caustic “Modern Family,” and focuses on three siblings, their parents, and their children. Every week.”) In one sense this just untangles the strands that make up most every TV show, presenting the A and B and other plot lines discretely instead of cutting between them: “Story One: First Date,” “Story Two: The Delivery,” and so on. Single-camera comedy like this, which has only the laughs you supply, looks sophisticated and serious in a way that “The Big Bang Theory” never could.Īs if to underscore this visual higher tone, the series, created by “Better Off Ted” vet Justin Adler, has been conceived as a weekly collection of short stories about an extended family. ![]() “Life in Pieces,” which premieres Monday on CBS, represents a change in direction for a network long dedicated to “filmed before a live audience” multi-camera comedy - from “I Love Lucy” to “The Dick Van Dyke show” to “All in the Family” to “Mike and Molly,” it’s been their thing.
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