NBC gets 'Crowded,' CBS' 'Criminal Minds' goes 'Beyond Borders'
Which is scarier: Millennials who return home or millennials who go missing in Thailand?
* CROWDED. 10 and 10:30 p.m. Tuesday, NBC. Moves to 9:30 p.m. Sundays on March 20.
* CRIMINAL MINDS: BEYOND BORDERS. 10 p.m. Wednesday, CBS.
Mike (Patrick Warburton, Seinfeld) and Martina Moore (Carrie Preston, The Good Wife) want to be left alone in their empty nest, and I want that for them, too. Sadly, their new NBC series, Crowded, isn't going to make that possible.
Created by Suzanne Martin (Hot in Cleveland), whose own daughters returned home to live after college, Crowded quickly refills the Moores' vacated bedrooms when daughters Stella (Mia Serafino) and Shea (Miranda Cosgrove, iCarly) land back on their parents' doorstep, unexpectedly and nearly simultaneously, in Tuesday's premiere.
Because no one in a sitcom ever phones or texts ahead.
Their returns, one propelled by a breakup, the other by a job loss, quickly - and by quickly I mean instantly - lead Mike's father, Bob (Stacy Keach), and stepmother, Alice (Carlease Burke), to jettison their plans to move to Florida so they can be available to "help" with their granddaughters. And by help they mean, of course, walking in and out of their son and daughter-in-law's home at odd moments, as sitcom relatives (and nosy neighbors) do.
Do I really need to tell you that hilarity does not ensue?
Crowded - after the two-episode premiere Tuesday it moves to its regular time of 9:30 p.m. Sunday on March 20 - undeniably touches on a demographic trend, but it's a trend built on lots of individual circumstances and hardly merits the one-size-fits-all suggestion that millennials have been spoiled by their parents and that's why so many won't leave.
In the three episodes I've seen, Stella, in particular, does nothing to live down that stereotype, while the apparently brilliant Shea remains in her own pigeonhole of socially backward geek.
Preston and Warburton have enough genuine chemistry to make me wish Crowded were a show about middle-age people trying to figure out who they are beyond parents, instead of one about parents trying to find a quiet place to fool around where their annoying children won't interrupt them.
A comedy like that might not fly in demo-driven broadcast TV, but at least it wouldn't be a glaring insult to the younger viewers advertisers might hope to reach.
'Beyond Borders': Spreading the fear
Fans of CBS's
Criminal Minds
know there's an "UnSub" - unknown subject - lurking around every corner in this country, and that any one of them might be responsible for our worst nightmares. Now, they'll be able to worry about UnSubs abroad, too.
When two American girls go missing in Thailand in the 10 p.m. Wednesday premiere of Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders, it's a job for the FBI's international response team, headed by Jack Garrett (Gary Sinise, CSI: New York).
Alana De La Garza (Law & Order), Daniel Henney, Tyler James Williams (Everybody Hates Chris), and Annie Funke play the rest of the team, whose need to work with, and around, other countries' police forces requires some finesse.
"A Thai proverb reminds us: What's done in the dark soon comes to light," Sinise says in a voice-over that's apparently part of the show's formula. In next week's episode, in which an American in Mumbai wakes up in an alley, missing a kidney and his traveling companion, Sinise recites a passage from Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore's The Grasp of Your Hand.
I long ago decided that "UnSub" might also stand for unsubtle, and that I had enough things keeping me up nights not to be spending time with the fearmongers of Criminal Minds.
But for those for whom one hour of paranoia is never enough, Beyond Borders offers a glimpse of a wider world, though one perhaps too frightening to be explored in person.
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