Should We Still Be At War With Life In Pieces?

Show: Life In Pieces.

Premiered: September 2015.

Why Was It Made? Because, SOMEHOW, Modern Family remains a juggernaut both in terms of its ratings and during award season, so naturally CBS would try to leach some of that success with its own "sprawling multi-generational family wackiness" clone.

Why Didn't I Keep Watching? Oh my god, you guys, the hacky, sexist pilot put me RIGHT off, for reasons I described back in our fall TV preview episode of Extra Hot Great -- and, not coincidentally, for many of the same reasons I quit watching Modern Family.

Why Give It Another Shot? Based on their Twitter feeds, people I respect seem to be into it, and since I was right to heed such chatter back when Happy Endings was coming to the end of its first season and give it another chance to impress me when its pilot had not, I feared that maybe I was missing something special by not watching this one, too.

What Aspects Of The Latest Episode Would Seem To Invite Further Viewing? Zoe Lister-Jones is by far the best thing about the show as Jen, wife to Colin Hanks's Greg and one of the in-laws of the show's central Short family. She doesn't get to be nearly as prickly here as she was playing monstrous city councillor Fawn Moscato, but when Jen's plotline calls for her to take it when Greg follows his sister Heather's (Betsy Brandt) dumb advice and tries to lower her end-of-mat-leave stress with the "controlled burn" of a dumb fight he picks, Jen is not trying to hear Greg's fake critique of her weight and comes right back at him with righteous fury at his idiocy. Given how sexist the rest of this thing is, I wonder how much influence Lister-Jones -- a screenwriter herself (of the underrated feature Lola Versus) -- had in making sure she didn't have to do anything as fucking dumb as mooning over a baby in a waiting room while her husband undergoes a vasectomy. Though evidently Betsy Brandt was just fine with that one.

What Aspects Of The Latest Episode Discourage Further Viewing? Literally everything else. I'm too weary even to get into the "husband calls wife fat, immediately regrets it, also doesn't even actually mean it" story, because if you don't agree with me that it's an insult to both/all sexes, I don't know what we're doing here.

So, moving on: can we call a moratorium on sitcom vasectomy plotlines for, like, ever? Because they're always offensive. This one, involving Heather and her husband Tim (Dan Bakkedahl), doesn't go the usual route of "husband pretends he got one but didn't and then it's a hilarious surprise when his wife gets pregnant," as other now-dead shows have done, but "just kidding maybe you should get your vasectomy reversed because I'm not sure I don't want a million babies, tee hee" was already bad when Seinfeld did it in the last millennium. In my experience, a woman doesn't raise the question of having the man she sleeps with surgically suspend his fertility unless she's very certain she is done with pregnancy; it may be a reversible procedure, but it's still a procedure, and not one real people undertake on a whim and then change their mind about. Reproduction is a big deal and people take it pretty seriously. Someone please tell that to America's shittier sitcom writers.

Then there's the olds, John (James Brolin) and Joan (Dianne Wiest). Their plotline involves her trying to sort out the identity thief who's stolen her credit card number and then used it to buy dozens of stupid shit from Amazon Amazing!, requiring Joan to call the credit card company to try to sort things out. Is there a racist joke about call center employees' imperfect English? Only within the first minute. There's also some tiresomeness about bad cell phone call quality (in 2015) and cross-talk with the fast food drive-through operator (ha?), and at the end of it all, where I had expected that this was all going to turn out to be stuff John had ordered but didn't want to admit to because WHY ELSE WOULD IT BE SENT TO JOAN'S OWN HOUSE, we never find out what actually happened! THIS IS STORYTELLING 101.

Matt (Thomas Sadoski), the loser brother living in John and Joan's garage, has some kind of business with Greg and a long-ago ping-pong rivalry that's too boring to discuss except to say it just made me sad I'm not watching Sadoski as painter/shitbag Gary on The Slap -- really the role he was meant to play, forever, for the rest of his life, as The Slap continued running until the very last cast member died, preferably on the set. I still miss it so much, you guys.

Final Verdict: Still terrible! Maybe even worse, in fact! No thank you very much, Life In Pieces! Don't want any pieces at all!