GROWN-ISH Immature

Article first published as TV Review: GROWN-ISH on Seat42F.

GROWN-ISH, a spin-off of the hit ABC sitcom Black-ish, premieres this week on Freeform. Centering around Zoey Johnson (Yara Shahidi) as she goes off to college, the series seeks to show a unique, yet familiar, point of view in the way that Black-ish does, albeit for a different demographic. It also looks to continue to be closely connected to the mother show.

Besides Zoey, who fans of Black-ish are already very familiar with, we are quickly introduced to the rest of the ensemble. There’s Nomi (Emily Arlook, Shitty Boyfriends), a closeted bisexual. Aaron (Trevor Jackson, American Crime) is super woke. Vivek (Jordan Buhrat) is far too obsessed with wealth. Luca (Luka Sabbat) is very fashionable. Sky and Jazz (R&B duo Chloe x Halle) aren’t as perfect as they pretend to be. It’s a more diverse, modern Breakfast Club, which Grown-ish goes to great pains to point out.

Many pilots go through meeting the various leads in hokey ways, bringing the main characters together in a single half hour through less than realistic means. Grown-ish sort of avoids that cliché by introducing Zoey to a new group of friends all at once, who happen to be in the same class as her, which makes sense.

However, Grown-ish still seems to feel the need to toss in the hokey circumstances. It details how each student ends up in a less-than-ideal midnight marketing class through zany sequences that prevent them from getting to the registrar in time. Thus, while avoiding the awkward setup initially, through flashback, it falls back into that familiar trap.

This is far from the only thing Grown-ish does wrong. The pacing is constantly interrupted by extended freeze frames, often with hashtags attached. The narration provided by Zoey is overacted and cheesy. Including fellow Black-ish character Charlie Telphy (Deon Cole) is a huge stretch that feels inauthentic. Chris Parnell (Saturday Night Live, Suburgatory) once again shows up as a goofy, out-of-touch authority figure; I love Parnell, but enough with this type for him, or characters on TV in general. A lot of the plot feels stilted and as predictable as it is uninteresting.

There are promising bits, though. The pilot has an important lesson to teach involving fellow student Ana (Francia Raisa, The Secret Life of the American Teenager), and it eventually does get around to it. It may be slightly preachy, but it’s something kids should see. There is a well-defined point-of-view from not just Zoey, but the other characters, too. The basic premise is relatable and has legs for at least a little while. Some plot twists keep things interesting. The backgrounds of some of the characters aren’t nearly as sanitized as one would expect from Freeform, the show being OK with flaunting illegality to serve realism.

I also like that Grown-ish seems determined to stay connected to Black-ish, keeping the world together. A brief cameo from Andrew (Anthony Anderson) promises more to come, which makes sense for a father-daughter relationship, especially when the college is geographically close to their home. Shahidi is supposedly still going to be recurring on the original. And Cole is apparently doing double-duty, starring in both shows at once.

But overall, I did not find the Grown-ish pilot very watchable. Sure, there are some good elements, and if they are developed further, focusing on those rather than other bits, there could be a decent show here. But the essential structure itself just doesn’t feel very well done, and some choices to inject off-tone humor distract from the cohesiveness of other threads. It might be moderately successful on the Freeform network, but I can’t see it really hitting a broad audience, or even bringing along much of the Black-ish following.

Grown-ish airs this Wednesday, January 3^rd, on Freeform.

BLACK-ISH is Good-ish

Article first published as BLACK-ISH Review on Seat42F.

BLACK-ISH, as the title suggests, does not shy away from racial issues. In fact, it goes right to them in the pilot, and sets them up as themes for the show as a whole. Other series have touched on what BLACK-ISH does, but I can’t recall ever seeing the debate about what makes a modern African American family true to themselves and their culture as directly as this one does on one of the Big Four networks, at least not recently. And it’s decently, though not overly, funny.

I really like Anthony Anderson (Law & Order), who plays Andre, the main character. His humor comes from his suffering, and BLACK-ISH has plenty of that. Successful at his advertising agency, Andre is excited about being promoted until he finds out that he’s heading the new Urban department and feels like he’s being used for his skin tone. At the same time, he also deals with his kids acting “too white” with their upper-middle class peers, and tries to help them remember who they are. Basically, he’s beset on all sides, fighting multiple battles by himself.

It’s pretty cool that the rest of Andre’s family doesn’t worry nearly as much about race as he does. His wife, Rainbow (Tracee Ellis Ross, daughter of Diana, Girlfriends), is a successful surgeon, and she’d rather concentrate on her job than perceived slights or stereotyping. His kids (The First Family’s Yara Shahidi and lesser knowns Marcus Scribner, Miles Brown, and Marsai Martin) are hilariously cute in their ignorance about the simplest things pertaining to their skin color, such as that Obama is the first black president. For children raised in this type of community at this time, race just doesn’t seem an everyday factor for them. Even Andre’s dad, Pops (Laurence Fishburne, Hannibal), who marched in the Civil Rights Movement, or so he says, though I’m not sure I believe him, doesn’t care as much as Andre does about their place in the world.

Being a white man myself, I may not understand all of the complex emotions and motivations that are part of being a black person in America these days. But I do know humor, and Anderson usually has it. The topics covered here may be touchy in certain company, but by putting something like this on TV every week as a sitcom, it will surely contribute to the breaking down of barriers. It doesn’t trivialize anything, but it gets the conversation going through an accessible medium, something important in the less-diverse-than-it-should-be network television landscape.

Unfortunately, it’s not as funny as it could and should be. As I’ve said, Anderson is good, but the material is weak-ish (hehe). BLACK-ISH has some great moments, to be sure, but there are also some weird ones. Anderson sometimes stretches just too far for a laugh, and it leaves the realm of believability. Luckily, there is heart and familial relationships to help push the show along when it lags between laughs. It could be better than it is with the ingredients it already has, and hopefully it will be.

I think the element of BLACK-ISH I like least is Rainbow. As a wife, she’s a stock character, the career woman aspect no longer being exceptional enough to rate attention, and lacking anything else to define her, at least in the first episode. Several times during the viewing, I found myself wishing Anderson’s Guys with Kids TV wife, Tempestt Bledsoe from The Cosby Show, had been cast instead. Not only did Bledsoe do something more interesting with a very similar character, but she had oodles more chemistry with Anderson. Sadly, it’s probably too late to correct that.

BLACK-ISH isn’t bad, and because it serves an important purpose, being the only current network sitcom with an all-black family, I hope it does well. The show’s take on current perceptions is sharp at times throughout. If the script could be cleaned up a bit, and often shows do improve past the pilot, it could definitely be a good addition to any DVR lineup.

BLACK-ISH premieres Wednesday, September 24^th at 9:30 p.m. ET on ABC.