Now that they've had 8 episodes, I feel ready to review this series. I do not understand people who seem to start writing a review of a series during the second commercial break of the pilot episode.
During the Winter Olympics, NBC aired no fewer than 1,834 promos for this series, and also the far-less-funny About a Boy. Many of the promos for "Fisher" made it seem like it would be a funny show. What I have learned over the last two months is that almost every funny scene or line was contained in those promos.
The premise is that this family-style comedy has a blind attorney (J.K. Simmons, known for his Farmers Insurance ads) as the father. In the pilot episode, his wife Joyce (Jenna Elfman, Dharma & Greg) decides her life isn't as exciting as she'd hoped, so she moves out. Now I am always troubled by TV divorces when they don't give us any sort of decent recent for the break-up. This was certainly no exception. Hollywood writers seem to think of marriage as a temporary thing, where your commitment is no more permanent than your commitment to staying at a vacation resort. As soon as you feel bored, or want something different—you check out of the marriage. And of course, you remain good friends with the spouse you left behind, as there is no real argument, no big problem between you. I shudder at this portrayal because I believe most people think of marriage as something quite different. I certainly hope so.
So in the pilot, Mel has to move out of his house even though he is blind and has been most of his life and knows where everything is in his own home. He finds a loft apartment and moves in, much to the delight of his 11-year-old son Henry, who finds a cute girl, Jenny, his age living down the hall. A series regular is Henry's friend, Runyen, who is supposed to be a geeky kid with great school grades, in the stereotype of a typical Asian. (Everyone knows they study relentlessly and get all A's, right?)
The funny scenes in the promos showed him using a chain saw to cut down a tree and pulling up in a sports car, while we heard someone off camera exclaiming, "You test drove my car!"—obviously that person had just learned Mel is blind. When we got to that episode, there was nothing more than what was in the promo.
Except for one brief scene, each episode has almost nothing to do with Mel's blindness. Otherwise, this is an ordinary family, except that Dad was forced to move out for no apparent reason. The four spend much of their time together as though there is no divorce, except it gets mentioned all the time.
Henry's teenage sister, Katie, is rather manipulative. In the most recent episode, she hosted a party at her dad's apartment without either parent's knowledge, and there was no hint of punishment for this deed.
The funniest episode was one that involved a carnival. There was a nice scene at the shooting gallery where Henry points the rifle for his dad, while Mel hits target after target. The best scenes involved Mel being misled about the type of ride he was on.
They are, of course, not in any way making fun of being blind. Quite the opposite—they portray him as a successful attorney who does lots of remarkable things for someone who cannot see. Jason Bateman does narrating, as a grown-up Henry speaking from the future, but this adds nothing humorous to the show.
The biggest drag on the comedy is Joyce. She seems to have been raised by hippie parents in San Francisco, and wants to act like she is still a teenager. (O.K., maybe I am thinking her character is too much like Dharma was.) But she has one cringe-worthy scene after another. She says things in front of her children's friends that no intelligent mother would say, because she should easily see how embarrassing these things are. She confronts people in the wrong places and says all the wrong things almost every time she's on camera. The mystery of the series is trying to figure how a good guy like Mel managed to not get driven nuts being married to her almost twenty years.
Her worst episode was possibly one where she gets handed a job at Mel's law firm, where she quickly alienates Mel's secretary so that she quits because Joyce criticizes everything about her and accidentally insults her in many ways.
I find myself smiling a bit at a couple of bits in each episode, laughing, maybe once, and being totally bored by the rest of this would-be comedy. They get into odd situations, but there is no payoff. One example: In last night's show where Katie has about a dozen friends over, her dad returns during the party. She gets everyone to be quiet. He comes in, talks to her briefly, avoids bumping into anyone else in the room and announces he is going to bed. He closes the partition to his bedroom area. (It is a loft without real rooms.) Just as Katie starts to smile thinking she got away with having a party without her folks knowing about it, Mel reopens the partition and says, calmly, "Tell your 10-15 friends to go home." Here there was no explanation, no way for him to have guessed how many were there, and not one hint at him feeling or hearing anything unusual while he was in the main room with everyone. We're supposed to just smile because "he IS good," as Katie says.
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