NBC's The New Normal

The pilot episode of The New Normal airs tonight at 10/9c, and the show resumes its normal slot Tuesday at 9:30/8:30c.

Over the years, and especially with three hit shows in the past decade (Nip/Tuck, Glee, American Horror Story), Ryan Murphy and his shows have developed something of a reputation. While they tend to be crowd pleasers, at least for their first few years of life, they also tend to grow into being sloppy, incoherent narrative messes, something that was made abundantly clear with AHS, which often felt like it was the show’s third or fourth go-around, not its first. Watching The New Normal, it’s clear that it’s a Ryan Murphy show, but – at least here at the beginning – it’s not because of the pilot’s narrative abilities. Rather, it’s because it displays that secondary Murphy trait – offensiveness in the face of a supposed strive for progressiveness.

There’s a key scene about a third of the way into the pilot that perfectly distills the problem at the heart of the show. Couple Brian (Andrew Rannells) and David (Justin Bartha) are sitting at a public park, watching parents play with their children, while discussing the possibility of the two of them raising a child of their own. David is afraid that since they aren’t “normal”, they might cause irrecoverable psychological damage to the child, and in response Brian points to the variety of families on the playground as proof that “normal” is just a relative concept. Cue a string of examples that include past-their prime mothers, interracial couples, and even little people. Each starts out praising the idea of diverse families, before quickly reaching for the most obvious offensive gag you can think of that undercuts what the whole segment is trying to do, mocking their unusual circumstances for no real reason other than out of a desperate grab at humor.

It’s the sort of humor that should feel familiar to viewers of Glee, another show that claims to be all about inclusiveness but never misses a chance to tear down its characters by using their race, creed, image, or sexual orientation as the basis for tasteless gags. Now, as a long-time fan of South Park and shows of its ilk, I don’t want to pretend that I abhor offensive humor when I’ve been so often found to laugh at such jokes, provided that they are used in a manner that actually mean something. So while Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s sensibilities usually mean that they are making some worthwhile point about our society (sometimes even if that point is well all just need to stop being so damn sensitive all the time), Murphy’s attempts at the same vein of humor have no such point. They’re just attempts at laughs through empty shock humor, and since they are done at the expense of characters that we’re supposed to like, they often times just come off as mean.

And all of this is shame because I want to like The New Normal, if for nothing else than what it’s trying to say. I agree with Murphy and co-writer Ali Adler’s attempts to redefine the word “family” to include more than just the heteronormative standard, and the show seems to have a solid, loving couple in Brian and David in which to do that. The problem however, is twofold. Not only do Bartha and Rannells lack the necessary on-screen chemistry to buy them as the loving couple that the show wants us to believe that they are, but it also can’t resist pigeon-holing them into the usual roles of gay coupledom. David is the more standard male half of the equation, into football and afraid to show emotion, while Brian is predictability flamboyant and feminine. (To return to the scene described above, it’s important to note that they’re only having the discussion of children because Brian saw a kid in the stroller while out shopping, and immediately thought how cute an accessory a baby would serve as.) By reducing the couple to the usual stereotype, they automatically feel less like real people and more like TV characters, and the whole ordeal is made even worse by Rannell’s role as a walking punch line.

Yet their helplessly gendered dynamic, as emblematic as it might be of the show’s problems, is even the worse aspect of the show. In order to bring a baby into the world, Brian and David hire Goldie (Georgia King) as their surrogate, who brings along her daughter Shania (Bebe Wood) and mother Jane (Ellen Barkin) in tow. While Goldie single, unplanned motherhood further expands on the idea of usual family dynamics, and King’s winning performance brings some much-needed warmth to the show, Barkin’s character is an anchor around the show’s neck. Ostensibly serving as the stand-in for the sort of people would boycott a show about two gay men raising a baby, Jane would seem to hopefully work as a sort of punching bag against hatred and bigotry, the kind of character that would point out the toxicity of such views. Instead, she serves as something of id for Murphy, tossing off offensive laugh lines (and there’s no doubt they are meant to invoke laughs) not just about lesbians and “salami smokers”, but also about other races – in the case of the pilot, that includes Asians and African-Americans, but no doubt more will come under fire before the year is out.

It would be tempting to write-off Jane’s close-mindness as something that the show wants us to laugh at instead of with, and the eye-rolling of the other characters to Jane’s words and actions serves as a safety-net for the show to claim as such, but too-often her lines have, to borrow a phrase, the cadence of a joke. And that’s The New Normal’s main problem: it too often assumes that bigotry and prejudice are rendered harmless when made as jokes, when it instead just muddles the show’s attempt to create a clear-cut and moving message for tolerance.

Other Thoughts:

NeNe Leakes (who played Coach Roz on Glee) also appears on the show, and she’s about as sassy and black as you would expect Murphy to write the character. It’s just another example of the show leaning on stereotypes for humor, and the less said about her character, the better.