‘Extended Family’: Jon Cryer’s New NBC Sitcom Already Feels Like a Rerun

Jon Cryer’s TV-star superpower is his willingness to keep at it. He weathered a litany of one-season shows in the ’90s before landing his signature part on Two and a Half Men, where he happily played second fiddle (or at least, less-famous fiddle) to his co-star Charlie Sheen, and then remained the show’s steadying presence for the balance of its run after Sheen’s rancorous exit, winning some Emmys for his trouble. Now Cryer is game for an attempt at an old-fashioned multi-camera sitcom revival that tries to incorporate some new-fangled (which is to say, two decade-old) techniques. Extended Family is the kind of project that desperately needs its stars to power through and attempt to drown out its creakiness.

At first, it looks a little like the opposite—like Extended Family will usher some established TV performers into a cutely progressive look at contemporary blended families. Jim Kearney (Jon Cryer) and Julia Mariano (Abigail Spencer) are already divorced when the pilot begins, co-parenting their children Grace (Sofia Capanna) and Jimmy Jr. (Finn Sweeney) by rotating in and out of the family home—nicknamed “the nest”—at one-week intervals.

This arrangement is complicated but not torpedoed by Julia’s new engagement to Trey (Scrubs star Donald Faison), the owner of the Boston Celtics, who looks slightly askance at the ex-couple’s arrangement. For the most part, creator Mike O’Malley (a familiar sitcom face himself from years of Yes Dear) isn’t trying to pump the characters full of resentful, bad-sitcom venom. The show seems genuinely interested in normalizing healthy post-divorce relationships, focusing on quirks of the situation rather than potential nastiness. It’s like the characters are in some kind of… modern family?

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