Photo: ABC
Did Back In The Game Score A Home Run Off Our Sports-Hating Commentator?
Before you answer: it's about Little League, and she's also not wild about kids.
New Show Attempted: Back In The Game.
Premise: After a grim divorce, Terry (Maggie Lawson) and her son Danny (Griffin Gluck) move back in with Terry's crabby old dad, former minor-league baseball player Terry "The Cannon" Gannon Sr. (James Caan). Along the way, Terry runs afoul of jerky Little League dad/coach Dick Slingbaugh (Benjamin Koldyke) and becomes the founder and coach of her own team.
How Far I Expected To Get: Well, I hate sports, and I hate precocious kids, so I wasn't sure I'd get all the way through the pilot, particularly when one of the first things that happens is that, on the way to his Little League try-out (strike one), Danny complains that The Cannon's house smells like "hot monkey ass."
How Long Did It Take?
What Did It: The Cannon gets an eyeful of a couple of hot chicas walking by and says hi. One says hi back, and The Cannon goes, "Not you." It's all in James Caan's delivery -- I fucking love that guy -- but it was the first thing that made laugh out loud and want to see more of him being a huge dick, which I got! Even the kid grew on me, as he solved a run-in with a bully at school by kissing him in order to confuse and upset him, which works perfectly. Terry Jr. may be the weakest member of the triumvirate just because she has to be the straight-man/pivot point, but she's hugely motivated by competition (she was an All-American softball player in college), and you know I respond to that, even if she has misplaced her competition in dumb sports instead of, say, awesome board games. Oh yeah -- and as soon as Terry complains to The Cannon that he never went to any of her games in college, you KNOW she's going to find out that he actually did but didn't tell her, and sure enough, she finds a cache of videotapes of her games in The Cannon's garage.
Worth Taking A Run At It? Well, to me The Cannon is a better character if he's a total and unapologetic asshole, so the videotape thing bummed me out a little. But I know that's not the kind of thing that sells family sitcoms, so if his glimmers of humanity can mostly be brief and confined to each episode's final moments, I might actually keep watching this, and I am as surprised as you are by this turn of events.