Remember TGIF? No, not the restaurant; the Friday night programming block on ABC. From the mid-80′s until about the turn of the century, it featured such family-friendly favorites as "Perfect Strangers", "Full House", "Boy Meets World", and "Sabrina, the Teenaged Witch". As Friday night started to become less of a "ratings" night, the programming has become more and more of a dumpster slot, with less popular programming taking up the evening. Most of the shows, if they can be seen at all, can only be found in cable syndication or DVD boxsets.
Its spirit is still alive and well on ABC, though, in the new superhero family show "No Ordinary Family". Michael Chiklis ("The Commish", "Fantastic Four") and Julie Benz ("Angel", "Dexter") are Jim and Stephanie Powell, a typical nuclear family. They love each other, and their children Daphne and JJ, played by Kay Panabaker and Jimmy Bennett, but they just can't seem to make their "dysfunctional" family work in today's high-paced world. Stephanie has her career, Daphne has boy trouble, and JJ is struggling in school. Jim suggests they turn Stephanie's work trip to Brazil into a little working vacation for the whole family to give them all a chance to reconnect. The trip almost ends in disaster, as they charter a tour plane that crash lands in the middle of a storm. The family manages to swim ashore and return home, where things seem to return to normal.
Seem to.
Jim, returning to his job as a police sketch artist, manages to save a colleague's life by catching a bullet with his bare hand. Stephanie (always in a hurry) finds that she has superspeed and can now make time to spend with her (almost) estranged family. The kids take a little longer to discover their own powers, but in the end, this "ordinary" family discovers they've gained something extraordinary.
It's a fun premise, and perfect for the network that brought us "Step by Step" and "Family Matters". But while the laughs are good and the few special effects they use are visually interesting, it's about par for the course. One can hardly imagine how suddenly gaining superpowers would affect anyone, let alone a whole family at once, so you can hardly criticize the writers for what seems to be some fairly disjointed dialogue. Blending discussions of how these powers will change their lives with talk of the problems they had before the accident doesn't go over so well. And while Chiklis and Benz are great performers, their chemistry does seem a little forced at times.
I usually give origin stories and series premieres a pass, especially where superheroes are concerned. After all, this is a new cast, with a new mythology and even new physics, it seems (keep your ears open for a fair amount of "lampshading" when it comes to explaining how their powers work). I'm even a little excited at the prospect of more family-friendly programming. That being said, I didn't see much about this show that made me think "extraordinary" was quite the right word for it. We'll just have to see how the rest of the season goes.
(Read the original review at http://fourthdayuniverse.com/reports/2010/09/a-very-ordinary-tv-show/ )
10 out of 26 found this helpful