THE GOLDBERGS

**1/2 (out of ****)

The Goldbergs the show is a lot like The Goldbergs the family, which is not a way of saying that the show is successful. It’s screamy and grating, and fitfully funny, and you don’t mind if it you spend ten minutes with them every once in a while, but any more than that would be hard to take. Based on creator Adam Goldberg’s (not the Hebrew Hammer) real life family, the Goldbergs are big, loud, and — most importantly — of the 80’s.

The biggest problem The Goldbergs has is that its characters, particularly the loud father (Jeff Garlin) and the smothering mother (Wendy McLendon-Covey) are tired tropes, and all of the ways that The Goldbergs tries to shine new light on them fall completely flat. Television has been teaching us for years that the second a woman shoots a baby out, she forgets all forms of self-awareness, social cues, timing, sensitivity, and any memory of what it was like to awkwardly go through puberty. She becomes a fountain of rude, loud bullshit, meant only to destroy any chance that their children will ever get laid. The pilot has an interesting explanation for this, but it’s not delivered in a way that makes any of it believable. Instead it just goes through the motions, most likely having changed all of the traits that made the real Goldbergs seem ripe for a television show into blander, more common tropes. It’s illogical, but fixable.

I think the real winner here is the main character, played by Sean Giambrone (with Wonder Years style narration by Patton Oswalt). Normally, in a show that is filled with many wacky characters surrounding one normal protagonist, the normal person is the worst part of the show, only there to point out how wacky the other characters are. Giambrone is given at least a little bit to do here, and a little bit of wacky himself. Maybe this is because he is based on the creator of the show, although that didn’t really help Jerry Seinfeld, did it?

There’s a little bit of hope shining through the episode that there are some creative people working on this, fighting the network brass in order to bring you something original and weird. There’s nothing to make us think that they are going to be able to fight hard enough, or that it’s going to be given enough time to slowly make changes, but apparently there’s two or three other new Wonder Years this season, so maybe those will be better.

-Ryan Haley