ABC’s promising-if-unformed new comedy Home Economics wants to be a timely show about the importance of family in a precarious post-quarantine world, when it’s actually a comedy slightly out of sync with its time.

Home Economics is launching at least a year late, since it could have been hailed as the best comedy in a midseason 2020 pack full of shows about how family is the best cure for economic insecurity. Through three episodes sent to critics, it’s leaps and bounds better than Outmatched, Indebted, Broke and United We Fall, a quartet of half-season series that even TV critics may not remember. All four ...