Game: Pooch Hall and Tia Mohry - Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries

The Game aired from October 2006 until ? on The CW.

Melanie ( Tia Mowry) was a first year medical student who had been admitted to prestigious Johns Hopkins University, but, instead, decided to move to San Diego with her boyfriend , nice-guy Derwin ( Pooch Hall), a rookie wide receiver with the fictional San Diego Sabres of the NFL. Unlike the mostly scatter-brained wives and girlfriends of most of the other players, Melanie was determined to have a career of her own as a doctor and was taking classes at a local college. Once settled into her new home she made two friends, Tasha ( Wendy Raquel Robinson), the protective, divorced mother/manager of the Sabres' star quarterback Malik( Hosea Chanchez), and Kelly ( Brittany Daniel), the pretty white trophy wife of veteran pass receiver Jason ( Coby Bell), the team's penny-pinching African-American captain. Derwin's concerns were mostly related to keeping his job and getting more playing time, while Melanie had to cope with the players' egos, the cattiness of the women in the wives/girlfriends organization, The Sabre Sunbeams, and the groupies trying to steal Derwin away-in addition to keeping up with her studies. In January Derwin proposed to her on live TV during halftime at one of the Sabres games , and she accepted. After the season ended Tasha gave Kelly a job as her assistant at her new management company.

The pilot for the game aired in April 2006 as an episode of Girlfriends in which Melanie's cousin , Joan Clayton, unsuccessfully tried to convince her not to move to San Diego with Derwin. Produced by Kelsey Grammer.

A Review from Variety

The Game
(Series -- CW, Sun. Oct. 1, 8:30 p.m.)
By BRIAN LOWRY

Filmed in Los Angeles by Happy Camper Prods. and Grammnet Prods. in association with CBS Paramount Network Television. Executive producers, Kelsey Grammer, Mara Brock Akil, Steve Stark; co-executive producers, Chuck Ranberg, Anne Flett-Giordano, Kenny Smith, Tim Edwards; producer, Dan Dugan; director, Tedd Wass; writers, Ranberg, Flett-Giordano;

Melanie Burnett - Tia Mowry
Jason Pitts - Coby Bell
Derwin Davis - Pooch Hall
Malik Wright - Hosea Chanchez
Kelly Pitts - Brittany Daniel
Tasha Mack - Wendy Raquel Robinson

Although played on potentially fertile turf -- football players' wives and girlfriends, not to be confused with the BBC's "Footballers' Wives" -- "The Game" feels pretty artificial and stages all its action near midfield. It's the kind of predictable attack meant strictly to hold the line established by lead-in "Girlfriends," which also comes from series creator Mara Brock Akil. The new CW is in a counterprogramming mode on Sundays, but the bar-raising feat the former UPN achieved with its comedy "Everybody Hates Chris" regresses here to more limited appeal.
Having junked its pilot, the series premieres with an episode that hits many of the same beats. Med student Melanie (Tia Mowry) is shacking up with an NFL rookie, Derwin (Pooch Hall), but she's threatened by the prospect of groupies, beginning with the gorgeous "image consultant" trying to help him maximize his few years of professional paydays.

Derwin invites Melanie to attend his first away game -- a no-no in the locker room, the veterans advise him, with their wives having correctly surmised that the road is "a license to cheat." As a result, nobody wants Melanie there, figuring she'll go back and fink on the players who aren't as upstanding as Darwin.

Guiding Melanie through this maze are Tasha (Wendy Raquel Robinson), the mother and manager to one of the team's stars; and Kelly (Brittany Daniel), who boasts about her marriage to Jason (Coby Bell), even if she doesn't trust him much further than an onside kick.

So the girls go all Lucy and Ethel by sneaking along on the road trip, hoping (or rather, not hoping) to catch their men in acts of infidelity, in which case the guys will have some 'splaining to do.

Part of an acting clan, the charming Mowry grew up on WB sitcoms and perhaps appropriately helps inaugurate the net's new incarnation. "The Game," however, is a throwback to the old UPN and a comedy block that, for better or worse, performed modestly well among African-American women but possessed virtually nil crossover allure.

Some of that can be attributed to the audience, but given the praise rightfully heaped on "Chris" -- which returns in fine form with an episode guest starring Whoopi Goldberg -- the net might have sought to expand on those inroads.

As is, despite the football backdrop, "The Game" does little to capitalize on its milieu, simply tossing a slow underhanded pitch to the "Girlfriends" audience, with less chemistry among its central femme trio than that established show's quartet. And if the recurring through-line simply involves women stressing about their men stepping out, they may awaken to find that the audience has already left them.

A Review from The New York Times

TV Review | 'The Game'
Football Wives, Bridging 2 Views of Race
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Published: September 30, 2006

To talk about “The Game,” a new sitcom about football wives that starts tomorrow on CW, we must be blunt about race — or rather, about sitcoms and race. Because on sitcoms, unlike dramas like “Six Degrees” or “Nip/Tuck,” race as an issue must be faced and cannot be handled in that quasi-liberal television way, meaning with outward decorousness, a deep sense of duty and high anxiety.

Put another way, sitcoms are supposed to be funny. They can’t require that all street criminals be white and all judges black; they must occasionally be real, or at least more relaxed about inverting biases. They can also target specific audiences more openly than dramas do — “The Game” is positioned as an African-American sitcom — just as, in their storylines, they aim to relieve ideological tensions instead of creating or ignoring them.

Thus the central clique on “The Game” is composed of white women who read Ebony and black women with silky hair like Jennifer Connelly’s. The idea is that the pro football players’ wives, who lead lives of luxury and philanthropy in San Diego, are one of those groups of stereotype-defying superfriends, much like the Tyra-Miss Jay-Mr. Jay trio of biracial-seeming androgynous personas who preside over Tyra Banks’s “America’s Next Top Model.” And the race-bending women of “The Game” have been written that way for a reason.

The somewhat banal reason is this: The new sitcom comes on after “Girlfriends,” with its largely black cast, and before “America’s Next Top Model.” On CW, which incorporates UPN with its history of black programming, “The Game” is intended to serve as a bridge from one way of depicting race to another. The first way is represented by “Girlfriends,” which follows the lives and loves of four strong black women and has been nominated for 14 N.A.A.C.P. Image awards. The second way is “America’s Next Top Model,” which has won little N.A.A.C.P. attention, with its men in makeup and constant talk of “Miss Thing” and hair weaves.

It’s a tall order for a sitcom to bridge this sensibility gap. But CW, which may be short on time, cash and confidence, is not dumb, and for “The Game” it has shrewdly built strong, straight black female characters (à la “Girlfriends”) who are nonetheless divas and therefore somewhat “above” race (à la “America’s Next Top Model”).

Tasha (Wendy Raquel Robinson) is the mother of a rising-star player, Malik (Hosea Chanchez); she’s all attitude and fierceness, and she takes a dim view of white women who marry black men. Melanie (Tia Mowry), by contrast, is an ingénue dating a rookie, Derwin (Pooch Hall); she’s wholesome and a good student, a kind of “Cosby Show” figure, who on the first episode tries to resist getting drawn into the meddling henhouse of football wives who are threatened by “away-game hoochies” who might sleep with their husbands.

Finally, Kelly (Brittany Daniel) is a white woman married to a black man, Jason (Coby Bell); she’s extremely suspicious of him and monitors him for infidelity at every turn. When Melanie asks Kelly why she can’t trust her husband, Kelly reminds her that their men are not ordinary mortals. Instead, they get things like text messages from Miss Universe. “Not Miss America, not Miss World,” says Kelly. “The prettiest woman in the universe.”

The suggestion that fame and money on this scale (Malik, we’re told, makes $40 million annually) require the suspension of ordinary norms underscores the hypothesis behind the whole show. “The Game” is about black characters, like “Girlfriends,” but more important, it’s about stardom, like “America’s Next Top Model.” And stardom has an interesting effect on race: it removes an individual from the binary black-white trap, as Ms. Banks — who explores both black and white styles of glamour on her show — well understands.

This powerful notion has had authority in pop culture at least since Madonna’s “Vogue” in 1990. “It makes no difference if you’re black or white,” Madonna explained. “You’re a superstar, yes, that’s what you are.”

THE GAME

CW, tomorrow night at 8:30, Eastern and Pacific times; 7:30, Central time.

Created by Mara Brock Akil; Kelsey Grammer, Ms. Akil and Steve Stark, executive producers. Produced by Happy Camper Productions and Grammnet Productions in association with CBS Paramount Network Television.

WITH: Tia Mowry (Melanie Barnett), Coby Bell (Jason Pitts), Pooch Hall (Derwin Davis), Hosea Chanchez (Malik Wright), Brittany Daniel (Kelly Pitts), Wendy Raquel Robinson (Tasha Mack).

A Review from USA TODAY

'Game' garners very few points
Updated 9/28/2006
By Robert Bianco, USA TODAY

As you've no doubt noticed, some games are more fun than others.
Unfortunately, fun is in short supply at The Game, a sitcom from Girlfriends creator Mara Brock Akil. It's pleasant enough, in a completely inoffensive way. The characters are for the most part likable, and the performances are for the most part passable. Like all CW shows, it's admirably diverse. It even makes a passing attempt to deal with some of the important racial and social issues behind the scenes in professional sports.

It just isn't funny. At all. Ever. Whatever else we may ask of sitcoms, they should at least be required to make us laugh somewhere along the half-hour line.

The problem starts with Sister, Sister's Tia Mowry, who stars as the girlfriend of a rookie football player. Mowry has grown into a very pretty young woman. But she has yet to become a comfortable comic actress, which causes her to fall back on the exaggerated reactions and readings that work for child actors, but not for adults.

Tonight her character, Melanie, is worried that her boyfriend (Pooch Hall) will cheat on her during an away game. Her fears are fed by one player's mother (Wendy Raquel Robinson, the best performer in the group) and another player's wife (Brittany Daniel). The Game has been reworked and recast since it made its debut as an episode of Girlfriends, but the changes haven't made any perceptible difference.

Underfunded and insufficient, The Game is both the beneficiary and the victim of a system that marginalizes an audience that yearns to see itself leading the team on TV, rather than just providing support. It's one of the few sitcoms on TV today with a black lead — and it's stuck in a block with all of the others. Yet if there weren't a hole to fill in that block, it's unlikely The Game would be on the air at all.

That's an old TV game if ever there was one. One wonders when we'll all grow tired of it.

For a Website dedicated to Tia Mowry go to http://www.tia-mowry.org/

For a Website dedicated to Brittany Daniel go to http://www.brittanydanielonline.com/

For a Review of The Game go to http://www.commonsensemedia.org/tv-reviews/Game.html

To watch the Opening Credits of The Game go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1COXQ97t20