TV: 'Til Death

Brad Garrett moves from sidekick to star in this mediocre retread of Married With Children.

Garrett and Joely Fisher are Eddie and Joy Stamm, longtime married couple; their new neighbors are newlyweds Jeff and Steph Woodcock (Eddie Kaye Thomas, Kat Foster). The humor, such as it is, centers on the differences between the youthful idealism of the Woodcocks and the tired boredom of the Stamms. Eddie gives Jeff a lot of lectures, explaining to him how miserable his marriage will inevitably become. "Men want to have fun," Eddie says. "Women want to drag that fun into the forest and kill it."

For this show to work at all, we have to believe that deep down, underneath all of the cynicism and the carping, Joy and Eddie really do love each other. But Garrett and Fisher are both specialists in cynicism and carping; they're such glum presences that it's impossible to imagine that they ever even liked each other, much less had any genuine affection. As for the newlyweds, Foster has a pleasantly ditsy chirpiness, but Thomas is so bland as to be invisible.

The jokes aren't very funny -- an assortment of "Woodcock" jokes were about as good as it got -- and Garrett and Fisher haven't made the adjustment to playing leads instead of supporting characters. Sitcom sidekicks can be loud and pushy, but you don't want that kind of energy at the center of a show; the worst seasons of Will & Grace, for instance, were the ones in which Sean Hayes and Megan Mullally took over, turning the show into Jack & Karen. Fisher and (even more so) Garrett are playing these roles as though they're still the eccentrics off to the side of the action; they both need to tone everything down a notch and quit pushing so hard.

But even if they were better suited for the roles, we've seen this before. Eddie and Jeff are already threatening to become Kramden & Norton, with Jeff getting caught up in Eddie's schemes; I can already see the inevitable Lucy/Ethel plotlines that will be built around Joy and Steph. And the Stamms' relationship is a pale, even less funny version of Al and Peg Bundy.

Not something that I need to watch again.