ABC’s “No Ordinary Family” debuts tonight at 8 p.m.
The pilot was made available to 50,000 fans to stream last month and several of the Slice of SciFi crew caught it and are intrigued by it. While we haven’t seen an official screener of the episode, several critical outlets have. Here’s a sample of what they have to say:
The head of the family, and the show’s best asset, is The Shield‘s and Fantastic Four’s Michael Chiklis, who stars as an unfulfilled artist with a distracted, breadwinner wife (Julie Benz) and two blasé teens (Kay Panabaker and Jimmy Bennett). On vacation, their plane crashes into the Amazon, they get that fantastic foursome of powers, and everything changes — and doesn’t.
With very little stretch, you can probably spot the spark for a decent comedy, with Mom, Dad and the kids bickering as they vanquish superpowered villains.
From Ozzie and Harriet to Marge and Homer, television has offered up various representations of the so-called ordinary family. But after years of such efforts and dozens and dozens of domestic dramas and comedies, the TV family continues to be mostly a fun-house-mirror version that rarely bears a resemblance to any family we’ve ever known.
What’s different — and refreshing — about ABC’s “No Ordinary Family” is that the efforts made to convince you that the Powells are normal, while entirely sincere, don’t last long. Their supposed normalcy disintegrates into something more fun and potentially more compelling well before the pilot’s end credits begin to roll.
Chiklis and Benz both have fantasy/superhero bonafides as, respectively, The Thing in the Fantastic Four films and Darla the vampire on “Buffy” and “Angel.” And of course Chiklis’ character on “The Shield” often came across as superhuman. So unsurprisingly, the show is at its strongest when they’re figuring out their abilities. Benz and (specially) Chiklis are so good at playing the thrill of suddenly having super powers, and they’ve been given a pair of entertaining sidekicks in Autumn Reeser and Romany Malco, who get to live vicariously through their friends and marvel at how cool this all is. (Malco gets the pilot’s best lines and develops a great rapport with Chiklis.) “Heroes” very quickly made getting super powers seem like an affliction, but at least for the adults in this extraordinary family, it’s a lot of fun.
We’ll have coverage of “No Ordinary Family” on this week’s Slice of SciFi. And we encourage you to tune in to the premiere and then tell us what you thought on the comments or by calling the VoiceMail line.
This show is about to be aired on Australian TV. We’ve been given no specific date, but I suspect February, as nothing new launches in January in Oz. I wait with interest and will post my opinion when it’s aired.