Posted in: Amazon Studios, Review, TV | Tagged: Dinner With the Parents, freevee, friday night dinner, sitcom

Dinner With the Parents: An Awful US Remake of Classic British Sitcom

Dinner with the Parents is a disastrously awful American remake of the British sitcom Friday Night Dinner - a lesson in failed comedy.

You may not have heard of Dinner with the Parents, and if you hadn't before this, you're lucky. It is an utterly dreadful American remake of the classic British sitcom Friday Night Dinner, with everything good and funny removed from it and replaced by crass and desperate US sitcom writing. To wit (of which Dinner with the Parents has almost none), this sitcom is about two brothers who go home to their parents every Friday night for Shabbat dinner, where something happens that turns the entire evening into farce. This basic and deceptively simple premise can be an endless goldmine for good comedy writers or a hellish trap for bad writers. Guess what camp the series falls into.

"Dinner with the Parents" is the Death of American Sitcom Writing

What is it with American sitcom writing where they insist on the characters loudly declaring who they are and what they are all to each other all the time, often several times in a single episode? It's like being trapped in a room full of deeply insecure narcissists. The four main family members of Dinner with the Parents aren't so much characters as cardboard cutouts the writers are still trying to define. There's a reason the original version of Friday Night Dinner is a British sitcom classic that lasted ten years. The main characters are believable members of a family who are weirdos with each other.  The protagonists of the US remake are nothing but schtick, and three of the four are utterly unlikable and obnoxious. There are several instances in every episode where these supposed family members react to each other as if they've just met each other for the first time in their lives! Do the writers even read what they wrote before?

There were three previous attempts to remake Friday Night Dinner into an American network TV version, and none of them were ever shown, so you might wonder how bad they might have been if Dinner with the Parents is the one that made it to air, and it is truly terrible. It feels inauthentic, the characters ring false and is more like a simulacrum of a sitcom. Writing comedy is hard, and this series is a prime example of what you get when it fails miserably.

The Weirdest Part of This Series

This remake may be set in America with American characters, yet it's still shot in the UK, and it shows. The exteriors are a UK suburban street and look nothing like suburban houses in the US. The guest actors are all British except Rob Delaney who lives in the UK now. They all play Americans, but their reactions and body language feel more British than American. It feels odd and inauthentic, but if nothing else, at least Dinner with the Parents is a showcase for how many British actors can do a decent American accent. God knows they could use the work – and Hollywood pays better than UK rates.

Why Beat Up This Show?

You might be wondering why I'm bothering to review Dinner with the Parents if it's so awful. I'm not that masochistic. It's always useful to examine why and how a series is bad. It teaches writers what NOT to do if they want to be any good at it. Getting any movie or TV show made is a miracle these days, and nobody sets out to make anything bad. This one getting made doesn't help.

Dinner with the Parents is streaming on FreeVee if you want to do that to yourself.

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