Review: NBC’s ‘Crowded’ is more than occasionally funny, but largely disappointing

Although “Crowded,” a new situation comedy on NBC with Patrick Warburton and Carrie Preston, is still officially set to premiere on Sunday, it in fact slipped onto the air a few days early. Its first two episodes were “previewed” on Tuesday, following “The Voice,” getting the double benefit of a popular lead-in and the possibility that a distracted television critic who had only the official premiere date written down in his calendar might not notice the earlier (though not at all secret) arrival.

Anyway, here we are, between the preview and the premiere. Created by Suzanne Martin, who also thought up TVLand’s defining original sitcom “Hot in Cleveland,” the series’ second installment also represented the thousandth television episode to have been directed by king of multicamera comedy Jim Burrows (“Mary Tyler Moore,” “Taxi,” “Cheers,” “Will and Grace,” “Mike and Molly,” and so on). If it’s thoroughly professional and more than occasionally funny, as might be expected from the preceding sentence, it’s also old-fashioned in a not necessarily good way, schematic, predictable and largely, especially in light of its fine and welcome cast, disappointing.

Warburton and Preston are Mike and Martina, whose daughters having left home in the series’ opening flashback, find they once again have the run of their home and lives. They no longer have to “set a good freaking example,” says Martina, adding, “Hey! We don’t have to say ‘freaking’ anymore.”

It doesn’t last. Four years later, the children move back in — within minutes of each other, conveniently — which has the added deficit of prompting Mike’s father (Stacy Keach) and stepmother (Carlease Burke) to cancel their move to Florida, just to stay close to the action; when not in a scene, they seem to be lurking permanently outside the kitchen door.

The kids come in two contrasting flavors, flighty (Mia Serafino as Stella) and cybernetic (Miranda Cosgrove as Shea, yet another TV character “on the spectrum”). “Sometimes I have trouble with social cues,” she tells her parents, as if they had not lived with her for twentysomething years.

Martin has said that the show is based on her own experience, but there is nothing particularly fresh in the premise; adult children have been moving in with their parents for TV ages, and the “crowded nest” syndrome has had a name since the 1990s at least. Notwithstanding however many “iCarly” fans Cosgrove can coax into her new home, “Crowded” hardly targets the youth demographic. It’s just not an especially good show. But not an especially bad one, either.

Indeed, it’s the kind of series you would have expected from TVLand before it blew off older viewers for the youth demo — that network is currently developing a series updating “Heathers” — and double-indeed, an upcoming episode reunites “Hot in Cleveland” co-stars Betty White and Jane Leeves. There are jokes about old knees, and smoking your kid’s pot, and choosing comfort over craziness in sex. (A lot of the jokes are about sex.) Two gags in the pilot began with the words “Men are like ... .” (They are like basketball players, in a way I can’t write here, and they are like balloons in a way I forget.)

I would be a liar if I said I didn’t laugh; I did, mostly at Warburton, that titan of ironic masculinity and master of the baritone deadpan. He gets a lot of mileage out of a little fuel. His “There you go” to Shea’s observation that “Life is short, random and ultimately pointless,” and “Doesn’t it though?” to Stella’s “Just because I slept with a girl doesn’t mean I’m a lesbian” work on a purely musical level. And Preston, so delightful in the “Good Wife,” where she has inhabited the (Emmy-winning) recurring role of eccentric lawyer Elsbeth Tascioni, deserves a regular platform. Keach deftly manages with the usually thankless role of Grumbling Old Guy.

The younger generation is constructed from references to YouTube, dating apps and Disney princesses. Stella says of a friend, “She’s completely freegan, has a sick Instagram, and she knows Drake,” to which Keach’s grandpa replies, “I don’t know if those are positive or negative qualities,” speaking for himself and any number of generations.

Follow Robert Lloyd on Twitter @LATimesTVLloyd