“The Fighting Fitzgeralds” ()
Tonight at 8:30 p.m. on WNBC/Ch. 4
———
MAYBE it’s all the judge’s fault.
No, I’m not talking about the annoying Sheindlins, of the cab assaulting “Hello! It’s Judge Judy, and Judge Jerry!” (Although God knows, they have enough to be sorry for.)
I’m talking about “Judging Amy.”
Judge Amy had the good sense to stay out of cabs, and go home again. While I really like that show, I wish she wouldn’t have bothered, because she seems to have spawned an epidemic of good-looking adult children who can’t stay away from their (mostly) widowed parents.
In TV land, if you make it to, say, age 26 and have come of age after “Friends” started, chances are good you will end up back in your sweet old hometown.
Didn’t any Gen X’ers grow up in slums? And, they’ve also accomplished the impossible.
They all seem to have grown up in strip-mall-less towns that haven’t existed since the ’60s.
Take “Normal, Ohio.” (You didn’t.) Or take “Three Sisters.” Or even take “Ed.” (Please. I beg you.) And all the rest of them.
With all those grown children returning to their cutesy hometowns filled with precious families with precocious kids and cranky grampas, you’d think there would be so many apartments vacant in the big cities that you’d be able to pick them up for a song.
If the rush back home we see in TV land was really true, believe me, we’d all be paying $150 a square foot to rent out our old bedrooms in Massapequa, while lofts in SoHo would go begging.
At least Frasier’s father moved in with him.
The latest dysfunctional family to go home again is “The Fighting Fitzgeralds,” actor/writer/producer Edward Burns’ (“The Brothers McMullen”) new NBC sitcom premiering tonight.
There are three brothers – gym teacher Jim (Justin Louis of Battery Park), bartender Terry (Chris Moynihan, “The Hughleys“), and Patrick (Jon Patrick Walker, “Sex and the City“).
The lovable-but-rambunctious brothers somehow find themselves living back with lovable-but-grouchy dad (Brian Dennehy). Well, two of them do anyway.
The gym teacher and his pregnant wife, Sophie (Connie Britton, “Spin City“), and their loveable daughter, Marie (Dakota Flemming), are already living there, when Dad’s favorite, son, Terry the stockbroker, waltzes back in – jobless and girl-less, just like “Ed.”
Why Brian Dennehy, whom I love with all my heart, bothers playing the father in this thing, I don’t know. It probably has something to do with the fact that he’s co-exec producer.
Anyway, there’s nothing here you haven’t seen 100 times before. Dad, a retired fireman, is looking for a little peace and quiet, but instead is inundated with those loser sons.
Sophie is wise, and beautiful, and remarkably patient for a pregnant woman with a small kid living with her husband’s family.
They settle their arguments in the local bar, because as one son says in reference to drinking, “We’re Irish, Dad – do the math.”
The actors are all good. They just need better material than this.
Life needs better material than this.
If they want to see funny Irish guys with funny fathers, they should tune into “Titus” with Christopher Titus (Stacy Keach as the father) or “Grounded for Life” with Donal Logue.
And wait until they (and you) see Denis Leary in “The Job” which premieres next week. Now that’s funny. Hilarious in fact.
“The Fighting Fitzgeralds”? Oy veh, as they say in County Cork.