Jonathan Cohen said: "
Lavin did great work on the show but I actually thought the last episode, which heavily featured Pamela Adlon and Richard Kind, was by far the best of the series.Adlon, who will replace Lavin if the show gets picked up for a second season, can more organically be woven into plots with the other three roommates. During the first 8 episodes, it was sometimes a struggle finding reasons for Lavin to hang out with her son's friends, which is less of an issue with a sister figure than a mom figure.
Meanwhile Kind, who is never playing anything other than Richard Kind, is a great comedic foil for Nathan Lane. He probably wouldn't be brought back as a series regular,but the shlubby Jewish guy with no personal boundaries and a one sided infatuation with Lane, I thought was a slightly funnier angle for driving Lane nuts, than yet another overbearing, Jewish mother (not that Lavin's character was a one dimensionalstereotype, her befriending a phone scammer was a great subversion).
Matt Bomer was the weakest link on the show for me, at least as written.Rose from Golden Girls is very clearly what they're going with his role, but while Rose was ditsy, she was also the most emotionally intelligent character on Golden Girls. Bomer's character is just stupid, and inconsistently so. He's also not as good of an actor as Betty White, though that's probably a ridiculously high bar."
It's true that you could see Lavin's character already being "islanded" out into her own B stories with zero connection to the others (like the Judd Hirsch storyline--also speaking of age, I can't believe he's 90. I mean he doesn't look young, but wow.)
I have liked Bomer a lot, ever since his soap work, but I think, as others have said, comedy, especially broad comedy, is a hard fit for him. You can see him making all these decisions on how to play the role and deliver the lines but I'm not sure they were good decisions (but it bothered me less as the show went on.) Still, a role like that is hard when you still want this ditzy character to have scenes like the one with Zane Phillips' character on Fire Island (and though I did like the final episode and it made sense for Kind to show up, I have no idea why Phillips' character did or if they even tried to explain how he found where he lived. Not that things like that matter on a silly sitcom too much but...)
It's funny seeing some people though confused by Matt Bomer being younger than the others--as I thought they explained this pretty clearly in the early episodes (that said it's a bit concerning to me to realize Matt is only two years older than I am. Oy!) I think a lot of these criticisms are fair enough but I guess for me it just comes with the territory--this was always sold (I thought) as a somewhat creaky throwback to at least its writing team's early Will and Grace days 25 years back (before they left the show due to that endless lawsuit only to come back for the lame finale and reboot seasons) and, mostly due to the cast, I think it works in that comfort TV sitcom way. Certainly better than the couple of 3 camera sitcoms I've seen attempted elsewhere on streaming services. Especially early on there are some... weird "maybe they should have cut that" things (like the whole Bunny kinda almost pimps out his friend and no one really cares?)
(But I am also wondering if people just have forgotten how obnoxious laugh tracks are? This doesn't seem actively worse than most I know--the UK can be especially bad with this, I was just recently rewatching some Miranda episodes with a friend, and dear God.)
Updated On: 3/31/25 at 05:08 PM
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