'Retired at 35' Premiere Episodes

Retired at 35 is another bland retro sitcom from TV Land, inoffensive and forgettable and performed with competence and ease by a veteran cast.

If you thought TV Land was going to branch out from attempting to re-create the sitcom styles of the past after the success of Hot in Cleveland, Retired at 35 will disabuse you of such notions. Like the surprisingly popular Cleveland, Retired is self-consciously styled after another era, a sitcom relic that would have been at home on network TV in the late ’80s or early ’90s. It stars Johnathan McClain as David, a 35-year-old corporate go-getter with an appropriately sitcommy job (he works for a company that manufactures toothpicks, chopsticks and other food-related wood objects) and really high levels of stress. On a trip to visit his retired parents (old pros George Segal and Jessica Walter, easily the show’s highlights), David gets fed up with it all and decides to quit, moving into Mom and Dad’s retirement community and resolving to live the good life.

It’s a fun idea, but at least in the first two episodes Retired doesn’t really play with the notion of a young guy living in a community of senior citizens. David still has an age-appropriate best buddy (Josh McDermitt) and love interest (Ryan Michelle Bathe), and the conflicts between him and his parents are classic sitcom storylines that don’t do much with the unique circumstances. Retired is best when it lets itself get a little weird, as when David ends up sleeping with his crush’s mother (the always amusing Christine Ebersole). If creator Chris Case would shake things up even just a tiny bit more, Retired could be entertainingly off-kilter instead of just sporadically amusing.

Still, Segal and Walter are a joy to watch, and their interplay is nicely acerbic while still containing the requisite warmth for a show like this. The younger actors are less impressive at this point, and McClain is a little too generic to be a compelling enough lead. As TV Land proved with Hot in Cleveland, they know how to give underappreciated veterans the spotlights they deserve, and Retired should offer plenty of opportunities for that (in addition to Ebersole, Shelley Long shows up as a guest star early on). Right now, though, it doesn’t seem to be offering much more.

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