TV Review: No Ordinary Family

Television has taken a bunch of stabs at the superhero genre over the years, but outside of the 60s comedy version of Batman and maybe the Bill Bixby Incredible Hulk series, very few have actually been good. Remember those heady days when we were all so sure that Heroes was about to be the next big thing? Yeah, not so much. It’s surprising how hard it can be to get right, since structurally ongoing comics series would seem to have a lot in common with television. But for whatever reason, television has been slow on the uptick on this one.

No Ordinary Family is flawed, to say the least, but it’s also a breath of fresh air when it comes to superheroes on TV. This is a show about comic-booky, Silver Age superheroes, with much more in common with the Stan Lee-era Fantastic Four and Spider-Man comics than with recent entries into the superhero film lexicon. It may run into trouble a little bit on the more subtle family aspects, and it needs to start to trust its viewers a lot more, but I was generally pretty happy with the pilot episode and hope to see more good things from this show in the future.

Michael Chiklis (The Shield, the Thing in the Fantastic Four films) and Julie Benz (Angel, Dexter) star as the parents of a family of four that gains various superpowers after their prop plane goes down into some glowy water in the Amazon. The show breezes through this bit in about four minutes, before the title even hits the screen, a relief for those of us who have seen every origin story under the sun. Their dynamic is actually fairly interesting as such things go.

Benz’s Stephanie is the bread-winner, a Reed Richards-esque research scientist, but finds she never has enough time for her family. Accordingly, she gets Flash-esque super speed. Chiklis is the sensitive dad who has given up on his dreams and feels slightly emasculated by his wife. He becomes super-strong and nearly invulnerable, and discovers that though he can’t fly, he can jump over medium-sized buildings (he insists on calling his jumps “bounds”). The boy-crazy daughter (Kay Panabaker) is worried that her boyfriend is cheating on her and that her friends are really out to get her. She discovers she is suddenly able to read people’s thoughts. The son (Jimmy Bennett) is kind of a nothing character in the pilot, but we are told repeatedly that he has a learning disability and then at the end he appears to have gained super-math powers or something, illustrated by Da Vinci Code-style glowing numbers.

Autumn Reeser (right) is surprised by the sudden revelation that her boss (Julie Benz, left) has superpowers in "No Ordinary Family"

The show can really be split into two parts, the superhero stuff and the family stuff. I really like what they’re doing so far with the superpower half. Chiklis particularly has a lot of fun experimenting with his powers and Romany Malco does a good job at playing his enthusiastic sidekick without descending into a terrible cliché (he is a district attorney, after all). I am sick of superpowers being seen as some sort of affliction, especially after Heroes. Part of the appeal of characters like Spider-Man and Iron Man is that they’re willing to admit that, yeah, whatever other consequences there are, having superpowers would be completely awesome. We haven’t seen much of Autumn Reeser in the role of Katie, Stephanie’s geeky assistant (Stephanie demonstrates her powers by fetching Katie’s Kitty Pryde action figure from the basement), but she has potential to be a lot of fun as well. I especially like that she asks the sorts of questions that never get asked in stories like this, such as “Why does running at super-speed not scratch off your corneas?”

Many people have suggested the classic superhero antics don’t work as well on TV because of budget constraints, but I would argue that advances in CGI in recent years have made this doable. If we can do Stephanie, can’t we do the Flash? The effects in the pilot weren’t showy, but they definitely got the job done. I was particularly impressed with the Nightcrawler-inspired effect when the villain of the piece revealed his own powers. We learn that our heroes aren’t the only ones with powers, and as such we have some interesting villain-of-the-week stories for a while. There are also hints of an overarching serial story, but honestly at this point I would rather the show take its cue from its comic book inspirations and take its time for a bit and build up a rogue’s gallery before becoming too focused on any one plot strand.

The “family” half is where all the show’s problems are, but I still have hope for improvement. The role-reversal dynamic played out by Benz and Chiklis’ characters keeps things from feeling a little too cliché. When the daughter tearfully confesses about her new powers to her mother, she prefaces it with “I usually talk to Dad about this kind of stuff.” Even if the characters seem a little annoying at times, they feel annoying in real ways, and the writers have taken the time to set up an actual, unique family dynamic rather just inserting cookie cutter types. I actually didn’t mind Panabaker’s character despite her somewhat exaggerated teenage girliness. She is constantly texting, even during the plane crash, which leads to the great exchange where her exasperated mother asks who she could possibly be texting now and she replies “God.” The son is a little too sullen, which could get old real fast. Hopefully his new powers perk him up some.

The biggest problem I see is that the writers don’t seem to trust the audience much. Pilot’s are hard, I’m aware, but they really don’t need to ram the problems being experienced by each character into our head seven times over. I heard the daughter the first four times that she said she thought her boyfriend would “wait” for her. The show also has a very worrisome framing device that at first we think is the characters talking to the camera like in, well, six other shows, but turns out to be them talking to a marital therapist. This is very slightly more original, but either way, it is completely unnecessary. Just in case we weren’t getting what Chiklis and Benz’s characters were feeling from their very good performances, we have to have their thoughts stated baldly to us in cringe-inducing cliches. This is a very bad sign.

No Ordinary Family is a lot of fun, and it should be right in the wheelhouse of its co-creator Greg Berlanti, who created Everwood and then went on to co-write the Green Lantern film. It is by no means perfect, but I have a feeling that in the end it’s a show I’ll remember fondly rather than derisively. If it can find its feet and trust its audience, there may really be something here. And if they don’t we’ll still have geeky assistant girl and her Kitty Pryde action figure. Many recent shows about superheroes have tried hard to distance themselves from their influences, but this is a show that embraces them, and that’s enough to make me happy for now.

About Dan

Dan Joslyn grew up in Ohio but now lives in Las Vegas, NV with his lovely ginger girlfriend, Tiarra, where he works as an office monkey. He enjoys reviewing movies and television for the site, and over-analyzing such things. He may be the Chosen One… but he probably isn’t.

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