No Ordinary Family--new tv series

We had high hopes for this show (well, actually, hubby did since he's much more of a sci-fi/fantasy buff than I) but have given up on it after three episodes.

A not-so-bad premise--Mom, dad, teenaged girl and boy are in a plane crash that lands them in the waters of the Amazon where they ingest something that gives them superpowers.

Mom can run super-fast. Dad makes super-leaps and takes to trying to stop criminals' getaways. Daughter (predictably and boringly) can read minds which results in her finding out her boyfriend has been flagrantly cheating on her with a friend of hers...yawn! Son who has previously struggled in math class now sees the portions of an equation that will inspire the solution illuminated as he proceeds and is suspected by the teacher of cheating. (Wow! who'd have imagined THAT outcome?)

It does at least kick over a few stereotypes since Mom is a topnotch scientist who provides the bulk of the income while Dad has been the stay-home parent as well as a police sketch artist.

Unfortunately, the scripts aren't very well written, and some of the characters' behavior is simply peculiar. We gave up when we couldn't figure out how the parents could be so clueless as to think that mind-reader daughter would welcome an opportunity set up by Mom and Dad to discuss her difficulties with Mom's research assistant and Dad's best buddy. Why the parents would have thought either person at all qualified to help left both of us wondering if superpowers had also made them completely clueless about how a teenager would react to talking about something so troublesome and unusual with two adults who are the parents' friends and not the girl's.

Oh, well...a tv show that isn't as good as you'd hoped it might be. What else is new?

But I always love Julie Benz!

Julie Benz will always be Rita Bennet now in my head.

allthegoodnamesweretaken wrote:Julie Benz will always be Rita Bennet now in my head.

Not Darla?

No.

Have you seen Dexter?

Oh, yes, I have. But I love what she did on Angel. The stuff with Connor is some of my favorite work.

See, the problem is I got mad at fox, so, in the usually all style I would, as my wife puts it, cut off my nose to spite my face.

So, I didn't watch them. 'Cause they were on fox, and I refused to watch fox. Or capitalize fox, apparently.

all

I'm kind-of enjoying it actually. It's obviously patterned after early Fantastic Four (Michael Chiklis actually played Ben Grimm in the more recent movies) and I'll watch Julie Benz in anything (put me down as a vote for Darla). The telepath finding out her boyfriend is cheating was irritating, primarily because it's been done so many times that it would be more of a twist if he hadn't been cheating.

That said, they've picked four powersets that can be put on screen relatively cheaply. They've at least nodded at the fact that Stephanie's powers are scientifically impossible. Having a guy who looks like Mike Chiklis as the artist and Julie Benz as the topnotch research scientist is a pleasing bit of genre-busting. As for the silliness of trying to convince the kids to confide in their parent's friends; parents are always clueless in TVland.