Heather ( Betsy Brandt) and Tim ( Dan Bakkedahl) are taking their eldest son to visit colleges as their two daughters also have important milestones, causing the parents to feel their age. Our stories/characters conveniently all find themselves at different points in their lives and relationships: Matt ( Thomas Sadoski) and Colleen ( Angelique Cabral) are newly dating, but their domestic circumstances make intimacy awkward. So it’s every sitcom ever, but edited in a way which, for the purposes of the pilot, doesn’t add up to much. Rather than having A, B, C and D stories that interact throughout the episode, Life in Pieces presumably will have those stories as their own separate segments, with the concluding segment perhaps tying everything together - or perhaps not. The gimmick is in the second sentence: the four short stories. Every week.” And if that sounds like pretty much every family sitcom ever to air, you have a sense of the announced potential that isn’t fulfilled here. The opening tag for Life in Pieces goes: “One big family. Still, if that’s going to be the template going forward, beyond engineering a trade to ABC for “Black-ish” and a player to be named later, it’s hard to see how this fits with Monday-night running mate “2 Broke Girls.” (And although “Pieces” and “Modern Family” air on different networks, they do hail from the same studio, 20th Century Fox Television.'The Simpsons': 30 Times the Fox Comedy Successfully Predicted the Future That’s a very talented roster of folks (plus a guest shot by “Key & Peele’s” Jordan Peele), and there are some amusing moments scattered throughout the premiere, written by Justin Adler and directed by Jason Winer. They include youngest son Greg (Colin Hanks), who, along with his wife (Zoe Lister-Jones), are flailing around in trying to handle their new baby son Matt (“The Newsroom’s” Thomas Sadoski), who has a rather complicated romance brewing with co-worker Colleen (Angelique Cabral) and daughter Heather (“Breaking Bad’s” Betsy Brandt), who, with her husband Tim (Dan Bakkedahl), is struggling with the notion of her son going off to college. This is all taken with surprisingly good humor by his wife (Dianne Wiest), while the assorted kids all have their own problems. Like “Modern Family” (and just attach that disclaimer to practically every paragraph here), the series squeezes a lot of story into each half-hour, with multiple plots involving the related characters, who, in the pilot, eventually unite for a rather morbid event: The family patriarch, John ( James Brolin), decides to celebrate his 70th birthday with a mock funeral, sipping a cocktail while friends and family eulogize him. Although the show features a topnotch cast, and marks a departure from Chuck Lorre’s multi-camera dominance on the network, “Life,” charitably, feels like one of those shows best watched while you’re making other plans. It’s hard not to feel that way about “ Life in Pieces,” a multigenerational, multi-point-of-view family comedy, which CBS went ahead and ordered, even though it’s really just “Modern Family” under a different name. Scott Fitzgerald announcing he had written “Great Expectations,” after which Allen observes that it was wholly unnecessary, since Charles Dickens had already written it. In his zany standup days, Woody Allen told a joke about F.
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