No Ordinary Family is an awful show, and I kind of like it.

I finally decided to give this show a shot, and the quick verdict is total guilty pleasure.

The premise is that an "ordinary family" mysteriously gets super powers. The initial problem is that this is not an ordinary family. Mom is a brilliant researcher, who can afford to put her family in a beautiful mansion of a house, and take the entire family on business trips to Brazil. Michael Chiklis is a completely emasculated police sketch artist, slash mr. mom. The children are remarkably normal, in that they're ungrateful brats, that you'd be tempted to drown in the river if they weren't your own children.

One of the basic themes of the show is that when they get their superpowers, they each get powers that allow them to achieve what's been missing in their lives. Mom's a workaholic, and doesn't have enough time for her job and her family, so she gets super speed. Son's a moron, so he becomes a super brain. I'm not sure exactly what the deal with the daughter is, she's a telepath, maybe every teenage girl just wants to know what everyone thinks about them? Of course the star power of the show, is Mr. Mom, who is constantly ridiculed by all of his coworkers and neighbors, do detectives really trash talk the sketch artist's life choices, and treat them like the total bottom of the food chain?

I know that there are a lot of assholes in the world, but I swear everyone that this family deals with are assholes.

Okay, enough trash talking the show. It's got a lot wrong with it, but it also has a lot right, okay, maybe not a lot right, but there's a lot to it that's fun.

First off Chiklis works surprisingly well as the mopey loser that's always aspired to be more. There's just something about him, he has that wounded puppy dog look down to a tee. He responds to getting super powers in just the way that you'd expect, he decides to fight crime. He's backed up by his best friend, the DA, and the scenes of them trying to learn the limits and applications of his powers are some of the high points of the show.

Similarly, Mom has an assistant at work who is a comic nerd, she has a statue of Kitty Pride in her locker. These supporting characters are really what sells the show.

It's just good fun, it's a little rough, but you should definitely give it a shot, maybe you'll enjoy it, maybe not.

Comments

Lemme Tell You About The Transformer, Astrotrain, And Why He's My Favorite

I am, quite obviously, a massive fan of Transformers, but I grew up in kind of a weird time for being a fan. Really, I'm just a LITTLE too young. I remember seeing my brother, who was six years older than I, get all of the coolest Transformers, and then by the time that I started being able to ask for Transformers for myself, the nature of Transformers had greatly changed. I have a great anecdotal story about him clipping Soundwave (arguably one of the coolest Transformers toys ever, which turned into a microcassette player) to his shorts and climbing a tree. He then proceeded to fall 30 feet out of that tree, and land on Soundwave, which poked him right in the kidney, and he peed blood for a week. While I still have a great deal of fondness for them, Powermaster Optimus Prime is just not as cool of a toy as the original Optimus Prime. Notably, if you landed on Powermaster Optimus Prime, he probably wouldn't puncture your kidney, but...

The Worst Contact Allergic Reaction I've Ever Had

I'm started to feel like a bit of a freak show. I've of course been injured by shrapnel from a pipe bomb, and I've got impressive scars to prove it (side note: One of my friends said that I need to come up with a really awesome story to go along with my scar, and I sad "Someone throwing a pipe bomb at me isn't awesome enough?") I've mentioned that I took a first aid/CPR class in my first quarter of college, taught by Ron Hussman at Edmonds Community College. He was a great instructor, with a lot of great stories being a navy medic for 24 years, I think that's what he said. I'm proud to say that the pictures of my leg injury are now part of his curriculum, but I got tired of raising my hand every time he asked if someone had done something in particular. Called 911? Check Used an epipen? Check Been in shock? Check Ridden in an ambulance? Check Had burns in your throat? Check (seriously, don't let your kids hold roman candles while they fire) Lat...

Y: The Last Man: Even Spambots Cry After Reading It

Right off the bat, I'm going to say that Y is the saddest story I have ever taken in, with an emotional punch like a locomotive (or a bomb if you will). No work of fiction has ever destroyed me emotionally like this has. That being said, the story may be a tragedy, but gettin there was a lot of fun. The story starts off with every male mammal on the face of the Earth being almost simultaneously wiped out by some kind of illness. With the exception of English major/escape artist Yorick Brown, and Ampersand, a capuchin monkey that he's volunteered to train to help people with disabilities. There's no apparent reason as to why they survived, they just did. At the time the plague hit, Yorick's girlfriend, whom he was about to propose to, was on a trip in Australia, while he was in Chicago. Naturally he sets out to find his true love. Along the way he picks up the companions 355, an agent of a secret government organization called the Culper Ring, and Dr. Allison Man...

Bryce's Pipe Bomb Survival Guide*

Search This Blog