The Grammatically Negligent – and hilariously grumpy – Review

No Ordinary Family

I want to like this show. I mean a show about a fairly ordinary family who gains powers and then must deal with the consequences. I’m the guy loved “Unbreakable”. Unfortunately the truth of the matter is there’s a lot here that’s wrong for this show.

The set up is rather simple. In the first episode the family goes on a bonding trip down to South America where, on a plane tour of the Amazon, they crash in a wicked storm. When they return Stateside Jim (played by Micheal Chiklis), a police artist, finds out he has super strength, invulnverability, and the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound. His wife, Stephanie (Julie Benz), a research scientist.    Their kids are Dapne (Kay Panabaker) and JJ (Jimmy Bennett), a telepath and a new super genius respectively.

The father wants to be a super hero, while the mother wants them only to be safe and normal again. There’s things that the show does well. The reverse set up of the high successful woman and her less successful but professional husband is interesting and well done, reminiscent of Picket Fences in that way. The self doubt the son exhibits is also well done and meaningfully held over from his days as someone far from smart.

Yet with all that being said there’s a lot that this show does badly, and some things that are borderline offensive. First of all, the gender politics between Jim and Stephanie are rather annoying. I understand that Jim and Stephanie are going through a rough patch as the show opens, yet the camera, and the writers seem to want to make the viewer identify with both sides of the marriage. Jim feels unfulfilled and only starts feeling good about himself when he starts saving people. She, on the other hand, is totally against that and only wants to get rid of their powers. In fact, she hates it every time he uses his powers, yet will use her super speed to do anything that she deems necessary. She makes the kind of unilateral decisions in the marriage that, if it were the husband making them, would only be deemed as toxic. I understand her worry since they don’t understand what gave them their powers and what not, but during the scenes that deal primarily with their relationship Jim is the only one ever giving up anything to succeed. In fact it’s only when Stephanie can use her super speed to be anywhere she needs to be that she starts putting any thought at all into her family. This is the female equivalent to father knows best and at best it’s foolish to have that kind of gender politics go into a marriage that you’re supposed to be rooting for in this day and age. It’s a different medium and a different format, but I can’t help but think of Unbreakable when comparing these relationships. That was a breaking marriage done well, because both sides were equally wrong and equally right.

Then of course there was the last episode where Jim had to have his black friend teach him how to dance because he couldn’t feel the rhythm. That’s right, let’s make fun of the white guy who can’t feel the beat, but it’s okay because his black friend can teach him how to groove! I’m not usually someone to bring up the race card, but come on!

There are a lot of ways that this show uses comic book logic well – the hand waving of Jim not being identified by the perps he’s bringing in, the hand waving for the collateral damage to buildings and streets as he leaps and bounds everywhere are both done very well in that they only pay the barest of lip service to it. And I like that. But falling into the company Stephanie is working for being evil (among other things) is just annoying. And not to mention that if she was the star researcher that they established her to be she would more likely be on the inside instead of on the outside of their conspiracy when the show began.

But I digress.

This show could have been the first season of Heroes on a smaller scale and more tongue-in-cheek. Instead, it only hits the low marks later one, getting too early and too deep into apparent conspiracy. So 3 episodes in all I can give it is a MEH, capitalized and bolded.