While in recent years Fox has had considerable success with its slate of animated sitcoms, they seem to have struggled to find similar success in live-action output. New series Sons of Tucson kicks off tonight after Family Guy and shares a little in common with the network’s most recent yet aging success, Malcolm in the Middle. Not only is former Malcolm star Justin Berfield an executive producer on Sons of Tucson but his fellow executive producer and director Todd Holland also spent some years with the show. Sadly though, this shared lineage does not translate to a great series as the series is more unsettling than funny.
Tonight’s premiere is the weakest of the first three Tucson episodes as it is forced to set up the show’s unlikely concept. Central character Ron (Tyler Labine, Reaper) begins the episode homeless, living in his car and badly in debt to a local tough guy. He is the archetypal slacker, working as little as possible in his sporting goods sales job and looking to make an easy buck.
Ron is presented with an opportunity to make some easy money when three children turn up at the store. It turns out that their father is serving time in jail for financial misdealing while their mother is gone. They are desperate to avoid being split up and sent into foster care and so they ask Ron to impersonate their father for an afternoon to enable them to enroll in a local school.
There is much to explain such as how these three children end up living in a house by themselves, why they want and need Ron’s help and, most critically of all, why a fully-grown man would pretend to be the father of children he doesn’t know. With much to explain it is almost as though jokes became a secondary consideration as laughs are minutes apart.
Here the focus understandably falls on Ron’s financial problems as we need to believe that his situation is desperate enough that he’d take this bizarre gig. As a motivation for what follows it does at least make sense but there are less laughs in this than you might expect, particularly once the debt collector makes his appearance.
We are supposed to believe that Ron is the sort of man who talks his way through life and out of trouble with a quick wit. It is something of a stretch to see so many adults falling for the character’s lies with little resistance given how unconvincing they are but Labine is a naturally affable actor and fits the material well.
Subsequent episodes are marginally better, if only because more time is given to the uptight pre-teen Gary (Frank Dolce). Though the scripts he and his fellow child actors have to work with are far from memorable, his timing is remarkably good for an actor of his age and he manages to elicit more chuckles from the material than it really deserves.
Of the other two child actors, Matthew Levy makes a better impression as the socially outgoing but irresponsible older brother Brandon. The tension between his character and Gary, who attempts to get him to pull his weight around the house, occasionally draws a few smiles although his character is not particularly likeable.
Much less successful though is the portrayal of the youngest brother Robby, played by Benjamin Stockham. This character has the cheapest of the laughs as all of his gags play on the shock value of a young child acting like a sociopath. This gag works well on Family Guy where there is a delicious sense of absurdity to the character of Stewie, but Robby’s lines have little of the style or wit and so end up being more discomforting than amusing.
A similar sense of discomfort ends up lingering over the entire premise of the show. While there is a sense of playfulness in the way the series engages with and then subverts the family sitcom staple scenes, the characters themselves are hard to empathize with or to like. Ron in particular is a difficult character to like given that he is looking to try to trick the kids into giving him a room in their air-conditioned home and the show never gives us any reason to root for him.
Though I applaud Sons of Tucson for attempting to do something different, somehow it never quite comes together. Burdened by a concept that is too far-fetched to take seriously, characters that are pretty unlikable and scripts containing too few laughs, the series shows little sign of life in these early episodes.
Right now there are a number of strong sitcoms on television featuring dysfunctional families such as Modern Family, The Middle or the three animated shows that precede Sons of Tucson on Fox. Though this show arguably takes greater risks than those other shows, it falls short of them in the place it counts most – laughs.
– Aidan Brack
Sons of Tucson premieres Sunday March 14 9:30/8:30c on Fox
