Ellen Gray: A 'Parenthood' with promise, and a good 'Good Wife'

PARENTHOOD. 10 tonight, Channel 10.

THERE WAS A time, not long ago, when most TV writers couldn't have sold shows about families to their own mothers, unless the families involved boasted fewer than five fingers per hand.

Outside the animated realm, co-workers had replaced most TV characters' kinfolk, along with people they'd known in college or who lived across the hall. They hung out together in diners and coffee shops and in apartments larger than you might expect for people who didn't seem to have particularly good jobs, and when their blood relations turned up it usually involved stunt casting. Or actual blood.

Nowhere was this truer than NBC, which tonight ushers "Parenthood" into a TV world that's a little more family-friendly than it was a few years ago, and not just because "The Office" is getting ready to push out its first baby on Thursday.

Maybe it took a souring economy to prove that Robert Frost was right about home being the place "where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."

Or, maybe it took ABC's "Brothers & Sisters," whose moderate success seems to have made that network, at least, safe for a show like "Modern Family," the splendid comedy that "Parenthood" is most likely to be compared to, however unfairly.

Unfairly, because we're talking about the second TV spinoff of a 1989 Ron Howard movie (the first, which NBC bounced from time slot to time slot for a couple of months in the fall of 1990 before canceling it, was written by Joss Whedon, of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" fame, and included some guy named Leonardo DiCaprio in the cast).

Unfair, too, because this latest version, developed by Jason Katims ("Friday Night Lights"), would have premiered last fall, about the same time as "Modern Family," had not star Maura Tierney had to drop out to focus on her treatment for breast cancer.

I really liked Tierney in the original pilot as Sarah, the prodigal daughter of the Braverman clan, who tonight packs up her two kids, Amber and Drew (Mae Whitman and Miles Heizer), and heads home to what she hopes will be a more stable existence.

She's now played by the slightly shinier Lauren Graham ("Gilmore Girls"), whose casting seems to have triggered a lightening of the show's tone.

Not to mislead anyone: There are some laugh-out-loud moments in "Parenthood," just as there are in parenthood, but no one's out to match "Modern Family" giggle for giggle.

For one thing, Sarah's older brother, Adam (Peter Krause), and his wife, Kristina (Monica Potter), are struggling with their son, Max (Max Burkholder), whose differences have become too pronounced to be ignored and whose story is close to Katims' heart.

Howard's "Parenthood" was one of my favorite movies in my own early years as a parent, but I wouldn't necessarily want to spend time with that family week in, week out.

Fortunately, Craig T. Nelson's patriarch isn't as harshly clueless as Jason Robards' character was in the original - but, then, this one gets to be married to Bonnie Bedelia - and the degenerate gambler played by Tom Hulce has been replaced by a garden-variety slacker named Crosby (Dax Shepard).

Best of all, Krause's Adam seems far less helpless - and more believable - than either his "Six Feet Under" character or the version Steve Martin played in the movie.

I've only seen two episodes and while I'm not yet ready to move in with the Bravermans, I'm at least curious to see what they're doing next.

Which is more than I can say for NBC's "The Marriage Ref."

Judging from my e-mail - and complaints from certain editors - the Winter Olympics were not a happy period for fans of CBS' "The Good Wife," who don't like reruns.

The drought ends tonight, though, with a fresh episode (10 p.m., Channel 3) and the long-awaited "homecoming" of disgraced politician Peter Florrick (Chris Noth), who's wearing an ankle bracelet and perhaps taking up more room in the family's downsized living quarters than Alicia (Julianna Margulies) anticipated.

I've been waiting for this all season.

Margulies seems to have found a nice groove as the displaced homemaker who's back swimming with sharks as a lowly - but endlessly inventive - law-firm associate, and fans of her character's so-far chaste flirtation with her boss and old friend, Will (Josh Charles), probably won't go to bed unhappy.

But it's Noth, whose character is either a bit better or a whole lot worse than we were first led to believe, who manages to command attention whenever he's onscreen. If only Eliot Spitzer had been this interesting.

The real fun begins when a very un-Scottish-sounding Alan Cumming comes aboard as Eli Gold, a Rahm Emanuel-like political operative whose efforts to help Peter seem guaranteed to complicate Alicia's life even further.

Which in "Good Wife" terms can only be good. *

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