The Bottom Line
Details
- Stars Rob Schneider, Claudia Bassols, Cheech Marin, Diana Maria Riva, Eugenio Derbez, Lupe Ontiveros
- Created by Rob Schneider and Lew Morton
- Airs Thursdays at 8:30 p.m. EST starting January 12, 2012, on CBS
Review
And it shouldn’t be too hard for Rob to get a handle on Maggie’s family, since they pretty consistently embody stereotypes about Mexicans. Of course they don’t approve of their daughter marrying Rob, and of course Rob constantly does or says the most inappropriate and inadvertently offensive things at every moment. It’s the kind of scenario that’s played out dozens of times between sitcom husbands (or wives) and their in-laws, and the clash of cultures barely adds anything new to the situation. And since the first episode pretty much exhausts all of the meager potential of that setup, it’s hard to see where the show will go in the long term, as we have to see Rob and Maggie (who got married impulsively after only knowing each other for six weeks) learn to live together and face life as a couple.
Maggie, who should be the show’s second most important character, is also almost completely a blank in the first episode, existing only to fuel conflicts between Rob and her extended family. The show’s central relationship is a total misfire, as there’s no chemistry between Schneider and Bassols and no sense of the intense love that these two people supposedly feel for each other. Rob makes a more genuine connection with Maggie’s dad Fernando (Cheech Marin) in the episode’s one semi-heartfelt scene than he does with Maggie in all of their screen time together.
The show is based on Schneider’s real-life experience of marrying into a large Mexican-American family, so presumably he has insights that go beyond the extremely surface level handled in this first episode. And his toned-down performance indicates that he might actually care about the material (there are no silly accents or hideous disguises present). So it’d be nice to think that the show will deepen over time, but this is a multi-camera CBS sitcom, a genre to which subtlety and depth are pretty much anathema. The supporting characters all get sorted into “wacky” types, including the addled grandmother (Lupe Ontiveros), the scheming best friend (Eugenio Derbez as Maggie’s cousin, who immediately befriends Rob whether Rob likes it or not) and the henpecked husband (both Fernando and Rob himself).
It’s heartening to see a network sitcom with an almost entirely Latino cast, and this show is in a unique position to explore a perspective that is rarely seen on network TV (and hasn’t fueled a sitcom since George Lopez was canceled). Unfortunately, it squanders that opportunity in favor of obvious, stereotypical jokes and tired retreads of themes from other shows.
