【2005 Archives】

When New Girlwrapped its successful seven-season run005 ArchivesFOX last year, it left behind a void for a sunny, quirky, ensemble-driven comedy. Luckily, creator Elizabeth Meriwether has ensured that her brand of humor will live on through her new show, ABC's Single Parents.

Now midway through its first season, it makes a great case not only for why it's probably the best new network comedy of last year, but also why it’s the perfect replacement for New Girl.

Single Parents, as the title loudly suggests, follows five single parents who form a “grid” because their children attend the same school. They rely on each other for babysitting, carpooling, and playdates before eventually becoming great friends.

It's got a great lineup of actors, including Saturday Night Live vet Taran Killam, Gossip Girl star Leighton Meester, and Everybody Loves Raymond's Brad Garrett, with breakouts Kimrie Lewis and Jake Choi. It’s also one of those rare television shows where the kids aren’t, to put it plainly, annoying as hell.

Much like New Girl, Single Parents isn’t looking to be break new ground or be the flag-bearer of a social message. It knows what it is and establishes it right away: a breezy comedy providing a positive respite from a dreary new cycle. Both shows demand you suspend logic to some extent if you want to buy into the central premise. This is evidenced by their similarly formulaic and cheesy pilots.

In New Girl, Jessica Day (Zooey Deschanel) goes through a bad breakup and moves into a loft with three strange dudes. Even though they barely know her, these guys band together to help her face her ex at the end of the episode. In Single Parents,Will Cooper (Killam) is the new single father in school. To avoid all of the extra work he’s piling onto them, the other single parents force him to go on a date and then end up rescuing him from it with a forgettable rendition of a Moana song.

Even some character traits are passed along from one show to the other.

Will can be optimistic and overbearing at the same time, much like New Girl's Jessica. Jake Johnson’s constantly exasperated persona Nick Miller has carried on to some extent in Meester’s Single Parents avatar Angie D’Amato. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that, much like Jessica and Nick, Will and Angie seem destined for a slow-build on-again, off-again relationship.

Fortunately, Single Parents is forging its own path outside of these similarities to its Meriwether predecessor. It's got the added complication of the five central characters — Will, Angie, Douglas, Poppy, Miggy — figuring out how single-handedly raise a child while making sense of their own lives. The show prioritizes showing these struggles but does so comically, while wrapping up the plot in 20-minute episodes. It isa sitcom, after all.

The show works well because of the cast's shared chemistry. They pull off a daunting task because if this was real life, it's hard to imagine their characters would be friends in the first place. In many ways, that's the primary challenge Single Parents faces. Each of the adult characters is wildly different from the other. Poppy Banks (Lewis) is a modern feminist mom who owns a library called "Winebrary"; Douglas Fogerty (Garrett) is a traditional and wealthy white man who literally lives on a golf course, married a young stripper (now dead), and fathered twins; Miggy (Choi) is just a clueless millennial who is somehow supposed to care for a newborn.

As the season progresses, however, the show is wading through these waters slowly. We see how Poppy and Douglas are navigating their perspectives while clearly falling for each other. Even the child actors begin to zero in on their very specific character eccentricities and add to the ensemble.

Single Parents's goofball humor has managed to stand its ground. It's an added bonus that Hannah Simone, who aced her performance as Cecelia Parikh on New Girl, also recurs here. The writing is quippy, the acting is fantastic and establishes Meester as a total sitcom queen, and there is a surprising amount of character development over just half a season.

Meriwether has offered up another good-hearted concept and runs well with it. Single Parentsstill has a long way to go to catch up with the comical pinnacle New Girl reached. But if ABC decides to continue with it, there's a good chance we'll see it happen.

Single Parents airs new episodes every Wednesday at 9.30 p.m. on ABC. All episodes are available to stream on Hulu.