TV Shows for the Whole Family

by Nancy Henderson

This year, we’ll be without Friends, so it’s only natural to turn to family.

Although there are still plenty of doctors, police officers and forensics investigators on the new fall TV schedule, a healthy chunk of new network shows not only revolve around families, they can be enjoyed by families, including children of all ages.

“I think the networks are beginning to see that the one thing they are still really good at is shows that can appeal to an enormous, broad audience,” says Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television, pointing to the success of shows such as Joan of Arcadia and Everwood. “When it comes to the young stuff, MTV and Comedy Central will always out-network the networks. They see this as being what their real franchise might be all about.”

The networks also may be responding to some of their audience, parents who want more shows suitable to watch with their kids without embarrassment. In 1999, a number of companies who were major television advertisers banded together to form the Family Friendly Programming Forum. They made their concerns known to the networks and worked with TV executives to start a script development fund, which helped in the creation of shows such as Gilmore Girls, 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter, Steve Harvey’s Big Time and American Dreams. This year, they helped in the development of three new shows.

One of those shows, Clubhouse (CBS, Tuesday, 9 p.m. ET) focuses on a teenager making his way into adulthood. Sixteen-year-old Pete (Jeremy Sumpter) gets his dream job working as a batboy for a major league baseball team, plunging him into a world of adult temptations that allow his true character to shine. Meanwhile, he has to deal with his overprotective mother, his aging baseball-loving grandmother and a rebellious older sister at home.

A different kind of family is the focus of Kevin Hill (UPN, Wednesday, 9 p.m. ET). Taye Diggs stars as a hotshot bachelor lawyer who suddenly finds himself as the caretaker to his cousin’s 10-month-old daughter after the cousin dies. “The first year really is his struggle with seeing himself as the father of this child, of trying to get back to his old life but also being weighed down with responsibilities toward this child who he’s bonding with,” says Jorge Reyes, the show’s creator. Inspired by the real-life situation of his own cousin, Reyes wondered how he might react to the unexpected and sudden lifetime responsibility of raising a child and put that into the show.

Complete Savages (ABC, Friday, 8:30 p.m. ET), another Family Friendly Programming Forum show, stars Keith Carradine as a single dad to five boys. After their 22nd housekeeper quits, he decides that this group of sloppy guys has to figure out how to clean and cook instead of living like animals. Speaking of animals, Father of the Pride (NBC, Tuesday, 9 p.m. ET) features a family of white lions who perform with Siegfried and Roy in Las Vegas.

In Friends spinoff Joey (NBC, Thursday, 8 p.m. ET), the good-hearted but not-so-bright actor heads out to Los Angeles, where his sister and nephew live, to pursue his career.

Rodney (ABC, Tuesday, 9:30 p.m. ET), about a working-class husband and father who quits his job to become a professional comedian, will revolve around the way his decision affects his home life. “Our first order of business in putting this show together was to make sure that it was real and character driven,” says star Rodney Carrington. “And if there was an argument, it was about something real going on in these people’s lives and not two people arguing about closet space.”

And that brings us back to real. They may not be family, but reality shows have made themselves at home in American living rooms, despite the viewers’ occasional snickers. “Sneering at them is one of the things that makes reality shows so fun,” says Thompson. “We love to feel superior to this stuff, but the final analysis is that the reason it keeps coming is because we keep watching, and the reason we keep watching is because a lot of it is really good. Plus, reality TV is a new enough genre that every now and then, something will come up that we haven’t seen before.”

That’s the intention of Mark Cuban, the self-made Internet billionaire and Dallas Mavericks owner who’s giving away $1 million to the winner of The Benefactor (ABC, Monday, 8 p.m. ET). Seeing a redundancy in current reality shows, Cuban throws a few curveballs into his show’s challenges. “What I was trying to do was to recreate the benchmarks of successful people,” he says. “I wanted it to be all open-ended. In real life you don’t know what’s going to come at you.”

Nancy Henderson is a freelance writer based in Nashville, Tenn.

first appeared: 9/12/2004