Review: ABC’s ‘Schooled’ and ‘Fam’ on CBS show the network sitcom is still kicking

By Robert LloydTelevision Critic

Jan. 9, 2019 3:50 AM PT

Television Critic

As the frontiers of television have been pushed out to new platforms and cutting edges, network situation comedy has become ever more itself, a place where homilies live and hugs happen. It is true that broadcast prime-time comedy has become a more morally complicated, sexually implicit zone than in days of old when Lucy or Mary ruled the air. But on the whole it tends to be bright and optimistic, even when it is full of snark and snickering.

Network comedies run longer seasons with a minimum of serial action; you can drop in any time and be assured that whatever changes may have occurred since you last watched will be quickly apparent, and won’t matter much. The message of these shows is that life is stable, whether anchored to a family, a pack of friends, a hangout, a workplace. That is why even as dysfunctional a sitcom as “The Office” can also feel like a not unhappy home.

Two new sitcoms join the long parade this week. “Schooled,” a spinoff of “The Goldbergs,” adds a workplace-as-family comedy to the ABC lineup Wednesday; “Fam,” whose point is embedded in its title, comes to CBS Thursday. Each is concerned, in different ways, with the care of sometimes difficult young people, and each features a lead character who was herself trouble in her youth. Each is a fairly efficient delivery for good feelings and some actual laughs, depending of course on what strikes you as funny.

Taking a leap a few years into the 1990s (somewhere between the release of “Nevermind” and the death of Kurt Cobain), the likable “Schooled” moves three recurring characters from the parent series and puts them at center stage in a high-school workplace comedy.

Lainey Lewis (AJ Michalka), who was still engaged to oldest Goldberg child Barry when that show went on winter break late last year (it also returns Wednesday), is still single here and, having failed to achieve rock stardom, is back at her old high school as a new music teacher. Tim Meadows returns as John Glascott, now principal of William Penn Academy, as does Bryan Callen as Coach Rick Mellor, who, Lainey observes, is “looking weirdly the same.” (Michalka is 27, more chronologically in tune with her character now than previously.)

In the pilot episode Lainey has to win the respect, or at least the cooperation of one of her students, Felicia (Rachel Crow), “an angry rage monster” and an echo of her younger self (and also Glascott’s niece). This requires that she become the adult she has resisted becoming, even as her still-active inner adolescent provides the blast of fresh air that is just what these musty old halls of high-school academe needed. It’s a device of course that has powered countless films and television series down through the ages — you can call it trite, or proven and reliable.

“The Goldbergs” has a warm, squishy center and every episode comes with a dedication, a convention continued in “Schooled.” (The pilot goes out to “teachers who inspire their students.”) If anything, the sentiment has been intensified here, though this may also be a side effect of a pilot episode in which all the characters need to accept themselves, or someone else, or their present situation, or a changing world, and because the tone overall is less hectic. These actors use their indoor voices.

Lainey, who states her qualifications for the job as “I love music; I work well with children, probably,” begins the episode teaching for economic expedience — she asks if she can get her year’s pay in a lump sum. That will change soon enough: “Even though I might have put my dreams on hold for this job,” narrating future Lainey recalls, “in the end I got a lot more back than I ever thought possible.” “I Believe I Can Fly” plays on the soundtrack.

Rough edges are quickly sanded, and yet the players are good — Meadows, especially, seems more valuable to comedy with every new role; they make it possible to look past the homilies. Unless of course the homilies are what you come for, and they are there for the taking.

Just so, there is no irony in the title of “Fam” — it’s what the kids call family now, the kid here says, to clear up any confusion. There are troublesome characters here, but they are troublesome only for the sake of comedy, as much as some sort of professional help might be appropriate. Snappy lines may fly around, but hugs are all you need.

Nick (Tone Bell) and Clem (Nina Dobrev) have just gotten engaged. Clem loves Nick’s parents as well — Rose (Sheryl Lee Ralph) and Walt (Brian Stokes Mitchell), theater people with a nice place that seems to overlook Central Park. Nick’s a college professor; Clem plans parties for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They are respectable and responsible and fun in ordinary ways.

Into their cozy world comes Clem’s 16-year-old, high-school dropout half-sister Shannon (Odessa Adlon, Pamela Adlon’s talented daughter), long unseen, followed shortly by her estranged father, Freddy (Gary Cole), a homicide detective and “narcissistic sociopath” with numerous bad habits and no talent for parenting. But the arms of family will be opened wider to accommodate them, as Shannon moves in with Clem and Nick and Freddy at least comes to dinner, bringing wine from the evidence room: “You remind me of the woman that broke up my first marriage,” he tells Rose. “How sweet of you to say,” she replies.

Created by Corinne Kingsbury (a story editor and staff writer on “The Newsroom”), it’s a multi-camera comedy in the familiar CBS style, popping off jokes in rapid succession. A surprising number are about drugs (because that is the sort of 16-year-old Shannon is), and a less surprising but still quite considerable number are about sex, because that is how things go even on CBS sitcoms nowadays. It’s all pretty predictable — isn’t that why you’re here? — and, again, the cast is good. It works often enough; a beachhead has been established.