'Melissa & Joey' Premiere

Melissa & Joey is a bland throwback to the days of ABC’s TGIF lineup of inoffensive family sitcoms. It takes familiar TV stars Melissa Joan Hart and Joey Lawrence and puts them at the head of an unconventional family, although really their interactions are as conventional and predictable as those in any unimaginative sitcom.

Making good on their apparent desire to resurrect the cloying “family-friendly” days of ABC’s lame TGIF sitcom line-up, ABC Family trots out veteran sitcom stars Melissa Joan Hart and Joey Lawrence for a show created by writers who’ve collectively worked on such sitcoms as Boy Meets World, Growing Pains and My Two Dads, as well as a number of Disney Channel tween shows. The result is Melissa & Joey, a comedy every bit as bland as its creators’ past work, and possibly more so.

Hart has a sort of breezy charm as Mel Burke, a former party girl who’s cleaned up her act and become a suburban city council member, but she still plays every moment broadly, in keeping with the tone of the show. Lawrence, divorced from his well-known dumb-guy “whoa” persona (made famous during his time on Blossom), feels more out of place, and has a tough time selling the macho bluster of his character, a former commodities trader whose life was destroyed in a financial scandal perpetrated by Mel’s sister and brother-in-law. Lawrence’s Joe Longo decides to start over by offering his services as a childcare provider to Mel’s niece and nephew, whom she’s caring for now that her sister is in jail and her brother-in-law is on the run.

That needlessly complicated (and somewhat dark) premise is at odds with the sunny, innocuous tone of the show, which plays like a modern update of Who’s the Boss? Mel and Joe clearly have sexual tension, and will probably end up getting it on by the first-season finale, but the whole dynamic feels rote, and the two stars have little chemistry. Their young co-stars don’t much register during the pilot, but they have a little more room to grow. As nice as it is to see grown-up teen stars still getting work (Lawrence’s distractingly jagged hairline notwithstanding), Melissa & Joey is quite literally the least they could be doing.

Disclosure: A review screener was provided by the network. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.