'My Boys': Friends with growing pains

Last season, TBS premiered the comedy series “My Boys,” a show with a light-looking plot about a tomboyish but beautiful young woman who lives in Chicago, covers the Cubs for the sports section of the Sun-Times and has a lot of guy friends, including a brother played by popular stand-up comic Jim Gaffigan.

The show was surprising in the entertainment it delivered in spite of its fluffy, “Friends”-like premise: there was no laugh track, which made some of the more absurdly funny lines stand out. For instance, in an episode from last season, P.J. (Jordana Spiro) criticized best friend Stephanie’s (Kellee Stewart) boyfriend for carrying a cane. When Stephanie explained that he needed it to walk, P.J. asked, “OK, but what about the top hat?”

It was promising to see good comedic writing too for female characters, as women still tend to be delegated the straight-man role in mixed-gender sitcoms.

The show arrives in its second season, with an appropriately more high-profile ad campaign (it helps that Gaffigan has made himself a regular guest on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” with his “Pale Force” cartoon shorts).

The expectations are higher, though, for the second season, and the first two episodes illustrate some of the struggles that its writers might be having as the show tries to really figure out what it’s all about.

In the season's first episode, P.J. flashes back to last season’s finale, when she and her friend Brendan (Reid Scott) kissed. The pairing was never really fleshed out in the first season, so the audience has no real emotional investment in it — and some of the “are we friends or are we lovers” angst feels a bit rehashed from “Friends” and “The Office.”

The second episode of the second season, however, “Off Day,” is more entertaining, plot-wise, as it investigates the comedy potential of a female sportswriter in an extremely masculine town.  In fact, it’s better when the city of Chicago is written naturally about (the show will sometimes throw in jokes about Dennis Farina or unions) and not shoehorned in to try and remind viewers that that’s where the city is set. (“What about the Sox in 2005?”)

Focusing more on P.J.’s  sports career too would eliminate the sometimes forced sports analogies that P.J. narrates, i.e., the first episode of the show’s season is all about the promise of a new baseball season, with additional similes to illustrate what each and every character was doing that could possibly be given a baseball analogy. The narration seems to be falling off a bit already, maybe like Sarah Jessica Parker’s to-the-camera narration did in “Sex and the City.”

The show is more interesting when P.J. has romantic interests outside her group of friends, because, with P.J. hanging out with four guys in addition to her brother, and she’s already kissed two of them (she had a romantic interlude last season with Bobby [Kyle Howard]), that storyline has the potential to get old fast.

Still, it’s pleasing to watch a show about a smart, capable woman who loves her career and who has a sarcastic, not overly sentimental relationship with her best friend. When Stephanie tells P.J. that her blazer makes her look like “The No. 1 real estate agent in Lincoln Park,” P.J. says, “No. 1, huh?” and Stephanie replies, “It’s not a compliment.”

Female characters don’t get enough silly humor in sitcoms, and it’s nice to see it given to some understated but funny actresses.

“My Boys” is at its best when P.J. is painted as herself (especially when she’s a little bit goofy, like when she’s on the Turk Vardell sports show in “Off Day.”)  The audience needs to get to know her, and not necessarily so much the boys, before it can really connect with “My Boys.” It definitely has the potential to be a very good show, and in the meantime it continues to look like genius compared with shows like “The Singing Bee.”

--Claire Zulkey

(Photo courtesy Ben Watts / TBS)