Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries - Sons & Daughters

Sons & Daughters aired from March until April 2006 on ABC.

Bland, middle-aged Cameron Walker ( Fred Goss) was at the center of a family of misfits in this crowded sitcom. Sharing his neat suburban home were wife, Liz ( Gillian Vigman), boss of the household; awkward, chubby son ( by a previous marriage) Henry ( Trevor Einhorn); cute little Ezra ( Noah Matthews); and seldom-seen daughter Marni. Cameron's sister, Sharon ( Alison Quinn), was married to uptight Don (Jerry Lambert), who ran an auto parts store, and mother to teenagers Jeff and Carrie ( Randy Wayne, Eden Sher). Half sister Jenna ( Amanda Walsh) had delusions of becoming a singer but was stuck working as a single-mom waitress raising young son Danny ( Nick Shafer), while her ne're do well ex , Whitey ( Greg Pitts) came and went. Then there was Cameron's bossy mother , Coleen ( Dee Wallace), and eccentric stepdad Wendal ( Max Gail). Most episodes revolved around some little family crisis or miscommunication, with clueless Cameron often winding up with egg on his face. Wylie ( Desmond Harrington) was the friendly young assistant manager at Sharon's diner.

Sons & Daughters was one of a wave of improvisational sitcoms ( including The Office and Arrested Development) in which the actors improvised their lines, and no laugh track was provided. Largely free of laughs as well, it expired after a short run. Half-hour episodes were aired back-to-back for five weeks.

An Article from The New York Times

'Sons & Daughters'
ABC’s Off-Kilter Family, Making Up the Dialogue as It Goes Along

By NEIL GENZLINGER
Published: March 5, 2006

"THEY really let us create the show we wanted to create," Fred Goss was saying about ABC's approach to "Sons & Daughters," the quirky new comedy in which he stars. But he was being only half accurate. The show may have made it to the air with its quirkiness intact, but the original pitch differed from the final product in one glaring way: Mr. Goss wasn't in it.

As Mr. Goss and Stephen McPherson, president of ABC Entertainment, tell the story, the initial idea was for Mr. Goss to direct episodes of the show, which he created with Nick Holly. But "Sons & Daughters," which has its premiere on Tuesday, is no typical sitcom - the performances and dialogue are largely improvised by the actors, which means casting the series took extra care. Many audition tapes were made, with Mr. Goss's disembodied voice on them, coaching and playing against the auditioners. Gradually it became clear who the lead should be.

"After watching so many audition tapes," Mr. McPherson said, "I went to him and said, 'Fred, you've got to do this role.'"

And so Mr. Goss (who ended up directing some episodes as well) is Cameron, the man at the center of the extended and somewhat fractured family chronicled in the show. The material is not pure improvisation - "We have a real strong spine; we have story arcs," Mr. Goss said - but much of the dialogue is created by the actors on the spur of the moment. That gives the show a deliberately ragged, hand-held-camera kind of appearance that sets it apart from scripted series. "We have no choice but to make our show look documentary," Mr. Goss said, "because the camera people don't know who's going to talk next."

The improvised format also makes for some intensive sessions in the editing room. "That really is the final rewrite," Mr. Goss said. "Basically the show is a puzzle: there are a lot of different ways to assemble it, and there is no one right way."

"Sons & Daughters" is actually the accidental product of an unrelated pitch Mr. Goss and Mr. Holly made to ABC for a project called "The Weekend," which was eventually snapped up by NBC but not produced. It, too, used a partly improvised structure, and Mr. McPherson was intrigued.

"I just loved how honest and insightful it was," he said, "so I pitched them back, using the same approach in a big, extended family."

Mr. Goss's Cameron has children, in-laws, parents, stepparents and practically every other genealogical possibility, and the storylines have a sprawling, freewheeling quality. Mr. McPherson said the innovations of "Sons & Daughters" may bode well for television comedy, which some had proclaimed dead not long ago. (Last Wednesday, Fox began its own testing for rejuvenated waters with a preview episode of "Free Ride," also a partly improvised show, which begins its official run next Sunday.)

"When genres get challenged, people take chances," Mr. McPherson said. "It's a terrific time for comedy."

Adding to the boldness of "Sons & Daughters" are the ages of the improvisational talent. Several of the actors are children - Trevor Einhorn as Cameron's odd teenage son, Henry, for instance, and Eden Sher as his tweener niece, Carrie. But, Mr. Goss noted, role-playing is, literally, child's play.

"Kids are the most natural impro-visers," he said. "They totally commit."

Miss Sher said she was growing more comfortable with experience. "Definitely as we've done more episodes, I've grasped more of what they're looking for," she said, "different ways to be comedic and still be real."

But with all that improvising going on, keeping a straight face isn't easy. "That's the hardest part of this show," Miss Sher said. "I always burst out laughing, and it's, like, 'Start over.' "

A Review from The New York Times

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: March 7, 2006

"Sons & Daughters," a new sitcom on ABC, is an entirely different show in the same situation: one of its executive producers is Lorne Michaels, a creator of "Saturday Night Live." Viewers expect the show to be more than just another sitcom about a wacky family; it is, but not much more. "Sons & Daughters" is a milder, more humane version of Fox's canceled "Arrested Development" — it milks the humor of absurd people and brutally frank conversation.

"I heard Aunt Rae tell Grandma we're going to hell," an adorable little girl brightly tells her family at breakfast. "Grandma, we're going to hell. Because we're Jews!"

The show has funny moments, but it doesn't stand out as much as the ABC promos suggest. Even the blandest network sitcoms now color their comedy black. "Sons & Daughters," which is shot without a live audience or a laugh track, is amusing in the same affectionately satirical way as "My Name Is Earl," or "Malcolm in the Middle" and "Arrested Development." There are very few sitcoms that celebrate strong family bonds and filial affection with a straight face, which may explain why so many college students are ignoring prime time and watching reruns of "Full House."

A Review from USA TODAY

You'll be sure to smile with 'Sons & Daughters'
By Robert Bianco, USA TODAY

There are sitcom families you treasure — but shouldn't emulate.

Partly improvised and wholly delightful, Sons & Daughters brings you the joys and outrages of a mixed-up mixed family that can make you laugh and shudder in equal measure. There's something terribly real and awfully funny about this engaging little sitcom, which takes the sweetness of Parenthood and adds its own slightly bitter touch.

It should go without saying that it would be a horrid mistake to model your own crew on the extended Walker clan, whose multiple dysfunctions will most likely enrage the self-appointed defenders of our family values. But it would be an equally big mistake for other networks to try to mimic this out-of-the-ordinary sitcom, which is fueled by the singular talents of its star, co-creator and producer, Fred Goss.

As an actor, Goss is a kind of Midwestern suburban version of a young Woody Allen, struggling to hold his sprawling family together despite their and his foibles and flaws. As a producer for the show, which allows the actors to add dialogue to a scripted plot, he and co-creator Nick Holly seem to have found a way to balance improvisational freedom with the need for plot, character and structure.

Goss stars as Cameron Walker, a happily married man with three children by his second wife, Liz (Gillian Vigman), and one maladjusted teen from his first. Cameron's sister Sharon (Alison Quinn) is married to, but not sleeping with, Don (Jerry Lambert) — while his unmarried stepsister Jenna (Amanda Walsh) is constantly fighting to get child support out of her son's loser of a father (Greg Pitts).

Tonight's one-hour, double-run premiere finds the family gathering for the anniversary of Cameron's mother and stepfather, Colleen (Dee Wallace) and Wendal (Barney Miller's Max Gail). Cameron, however, knows a secret: Wendal is thinking of leaving Colleen.

Problem is, neither Cameron nor anyone else in his family can keep a secret. (As Cameron complains, his relatives keep forgetting that there are some things you're supposed to say only behind people's backs.) Soon the party and the family are spinning out of control.

The entire cast is excellent (it's a particular joy to have Gail back in the sitcom fold), and unlike the actors in the similarly structured Free Ride, they never allow their own creative play to become the sole focus of the show. They stay in character, and the characters they're creating are by and large both likable and believable, which is what separates Sons from the brilliant but aloof Arrested Development.

Let's hope that's enough to spare Sons the adored-but-ignored fate that befell Arrested. We don't need any more hidden treasures on TV.

This one deserves to be found.

A Review from Entertainment Weekly

TV Review
Sons & Daughters

By Henry Goldblatt

First let's take a moment to praise ABC's new comedy Sons & Daughters for what it omits: a fat husband, a knockout wife, and Jenna Elfman.

The third new series off the network's '06 comedy assembly line (after Crumbs and Emily's Reasons Why Not), S&D is a family show that strives to — forgive me for pulling out this old chestnut — put the ''fun'' in ''dysfunctional.'' Its customizations on the sitcom template are twofold: S&D is partially improvised (thanks, Larry David) and requires an advanced degree in genealogy to untangle all the family relationships.

At its center is Cameron (co-creator Fred Goss), a haggard but cool dad (don't forget ''cool'' or he may smother you with his black Ramones T-shirt) with the slightly familiar, worn face of a performer who could have appeared on Saturday Night Live at some point in the mid-'80s. (No coincidence, perhaps, since SNL's Lorne Michaels is an executive producer of the comedy.) Cameron's a small-town Midwestern man plagued by 13 (at my best count) family members. And uselessly busy plots unfold around him, such as: Cam borrows money from his sister, who doesn't really have it, so she borrows from Mom, who provides her with the loan, but quickly wants it repaid so she can lend money to her other daughter. (Pause for breath here. Told you that genealogy degree would come in handy.) Despite all the hardships the writers heap upon Cameron, he's so unsympathetic you actually end up rooting for his demented teenage kid, Henry (Trevor Einhorn — Frasier Crane's son, Frederick, all grown up), as he pranks Dad by putting raw eggs in his bed and videotaping the resulting chaos.

Credit to Goss and Michaels for trying to bring improvisation into network situation comedy, but for a show that's supposed to be all loosey-goosey, too many of S&D's visual and aural cues are rigidly staged. Take the opening theme (Cheap Trick's ''Surrender'' — you know the one: ''Mommy's alright, Daddy's alright, they just seem a little weird'') or the freeze-frame labels that explain the characters' relationship to Cameron. A conversation about bowel movements is followed two scenes later by characters spreading manure in a garden. And unlike Malcolm in the Middle or Arrested Development (two obvious inspirations), S&D is awfully disdainful of the world it inhabits — never a promising sign for a fledgling series. As Cameron's sister, Sharon (Alison Quinn), explains: ''I'm pretty in Cincinnati, I'm not pretty in a general sense.''

If that doesn't put off Ohioans (and those who respect them), some disgusting one-liners might. Hair-removal jokes seem to be of particular fascination to the writers (Sharon tells her 13-year-old daughter, ''Everyone in this family tends to their own garden''), as are incest references that would make Oedipus blush. And just when you think all of your senses have been offended, episode 3 ends with a thud — yes, a fart. I thought I smelled something foul.

A Review from The SF Chronicle

Improv sparks 'Sons & Daughters,' a family sitcom easy to adopt
Tim Goodman

Tuesday, March 7, 2006

Stephen McPherson is the entertainment president at ABC, a network that has a long, undistinguished relationship with televising comedy, though he himself had his fingers on a bunch of good sitcoms prior to his current job and not counting "Emily's Reasons Why Not."
He has a developer's touch with things that are funny, just not quite yet with ABC.

That he has decided, just a month shy of his second year in the job, to right a whole bunch of wrongs with one show and give viewers something gloriously funny to laugh at is much admired on this end. "Sons & Daughters," which airs two back-to-back episodes at 9 on Tuesday night, is one of the funniest sitcoms to come along in years.

It is also -- pay attention to this part -- utterly without hope of success. To be proven wrong on that would be wonderful, a kind of didn't-see-it-coming miracle. Let the Nielsen gods rise up and save (or at least help) television.

Nah, didn't think that would work.

Why would "Sons & Daughters," executive-produced by Lorne Michaels ("Saturday Night Live"), be crushed by the forces of unacceptably bad viewing habits despite a stellar script by creator and star Fred Goss?

First off, it owes some kind of debt to "Arrested Development" -- and we all know how well that went. "Sons & Daughters" is part improv, has no laugh track and traffics in both subtlety (most of the time) and quick-witted dialogue, attributes that have never been appreciated by the masses, and, last time we checked, ABC was in the business of appealing to the masses.

Oh, and "According to Jim" is the lead-in show. Now, the difference between "According to Jim" and "Sons & Daughters" is of such a magnitude that the burden of description would make a person fall down on the ground, beaten. But the important thing to remember is that people who will watch "According to Jim" of their own accord and not with the allure of cash or the prod of a razor-sharp stick would not, under any circumstances that come readily to mind, watch "Sons & Daughters." Imagine a guy who just bought a ticket to "Hooter Girls in IMAX" walking into a Fellini retrospective.

On ABC, "Sons & Daughters" is just a game of "Which one of these is not like the others?" Another problem is that "Sons & Daughters" has 16 characters, including small children. There are brothers and sisters, step-family, divorced parents, cousins -- even with a family tree, it would be difficult to keep track. Americans have a history of liking their sitcoms simple, with maybe four main characters at most.

There's also this weird tonality issue, where the comedy is at once satirically biting, followed by nuanced references with no clanging laugh track to note their arrival, the swift delivery of epigrammatic one-liners and, just to be different, moments of sweetness not meant to be funny. It's a family comedy, after all.

"Sons & Daughters" is, however, a real gem, a comedic gift. So thanks, McPherson -- no more dismissive snarkiness about ABC comedies on this end until you kill the show. One would assume that will be next week sometime.

It seems pointless to describe the convoluted premise of the series when it's much more urgent to say, "TiVo as many of these as you can before it goes away." But here goes:

Cameron (Goss -- thanks for writing the show, by the way, and you were funny in it), is a nice guy on his second marriage, this one to Liz (Gillian Vigman -- you were wonderful in this and lovely, too). They have, if the math is right, three kids, two together, one from Cameron's previous marriage.

Cameron has a sister, Sharon (Alison Quinn -- outstanding comedic chops, by the way), married to Don (Jerry Lambert -- ditto), and the two haven't had sex in a really, really long time. He's into bad community theater and plays the harmonica. They have two kids, including Carrie (Eden Sher - you play a 13-year-old channeling Catherine Keener to perfection).

Cameron and Sharon have a half-sister, Jenna (Amanda Walsh), daughter of Wendal (Max Gail -- you were great in this role, buddy), who married Cameron's mom, Colleen (Dee Wallace -- ditto).

The series kicks off with the pending 25th anniversary of Wendal and Colleen, though Wendal has confided in Cameron that he's thinking of leaving Colleen -- like, soon.

It's a secret that's not kept. And family chaos and hilarity of all kinds emerges from there.

Setting up the jokes takes too long. You really have to see it. But watch for these:

-- Regarding a bikini wax: "Everybody in this family tends to their own garden."

-- Dividing up goods in a divorce: "Just because you barfed in a car doesn't make it yours."

-- On sex gone bad: "What about you? It's like throwing a wrench into a closet."

One day we'll all look back fondly on this weird experiment ABC undertook with a challenging, sophisticated comedy -- and we'll laugh. Hopefully at all 13 episodes. Yeah. Now that's funny. Oh, well.

An Article from The New York Times

Television
Car in Every Garage, Sitcom in Every Cul-de-Sac

By DAVID CARR
Published: April 2, 2006

THE show opens with a familiar scene: post-coital 30-somethings in a pillowed two-shot. Immediately you know: this is another sitcom about attractive, sarcastic, socially active urbanites blessed with really good apartments and no shortage of dates.

"What did you say your name was?" he asks. Hmm, they might be a bit more socially active than most.

"Tammi, with an i," she coos. An i. Sounds racy.

Just then a baby's foot juts into the picture. And from behind the man comes word, "I peed," from a young boy in the same bed. The camera pulls back to a set right off the shelf from Bed, Bath & Beyond. As the boy trips off down the hall of the split-level, we know that we are not in Manhattan — or Boston or Chicago — anymore. We are in that unnamed middle place where most of America lives.

The show is "Sons & Daughters," a new comedy on ABC. In it, a well-housed extended family seems constantly on the verge of going nuclear. Cameron and Liz Walker, who as it turns out are far from single, have parents who may divorce on their anniversary, a doddering aunt who believes they are going to hell because Liz is Jewish and siblings whose marriages are happy but sexless. It seems like such a nice neighborhood, but the mortgage on the human soul is a bit dear.

That opening scene does more than just show where the Walkers live, though; in a sense, it demonstrates where television as a whole resides this season. Because now, as never before in recent memory (and TV memory is always recent), sitcoms, hourlong dramas, reality shows and all the rest of it have taken up residence at a safe commuting distance from the cities that so recently spawned all those sexy, friendly scenarios.

Just a few years ago, for a television show or film to set up house out in suburbia and depict it as a place tinged with emotions too dark for a Tupperware party seemed like a daring, provocative move. Movies like "The Ice Storm" and "American Beauty" won over critics by refusing to pretend that at a reduced population density all is sweetness and light. "Married ... With Children" and "The Simpsons" subverted the suburban ideal in broadly comic ways and then of course, along came "The Sopranos," in which the guy next door isn't just a mobster, he's a head case.

By last season the success of "Desperate Housewives" showed that suburban gothic wasn't just for cable subscribers with a taste for the macabre; it appealed just as easily to the most mainstream audiences, even the fraternity boys in whose lad magazines the shows' starlets undressed.

And this season, the balance has tipped — hard. A staggering number of programs, just like the people who watch them, now live in the land of the two-car garage. Along with a change of address, the shows are registering a change of subtext, too. The little Walker kid with the weak bladder is a reminder that seduction and consummation, the fundamental arc of most television, sometimes result in actual reproduction.

Left behind in this great migration, the urban, urbane ensemble shows that were so recently popular now look like curios in reruns, with their conjured families and quaint city rituals. Well, perhaps the search for Mr. or Mrs. Big had to end sometime.

IN a sense, it's all just a variation on television's eternal project: marooning various tribes and letting them slug it out. The good people of "Gilligan's Island" do it, the mechanical and human astronauts of "Lost in Space" do it, and even educated fleas on "Survivor" do it. So why not the residents down at the end of the cul-de-sac?

Actually, that's where so many of TV's roots were first planted. "Father Knows Best," "The Donna Reed Show," "Dennis the Menace" and, most remarkably, "Leave It to Beaver," all offered tidy life lessons on even tidier lawns. But at some point along the way television, like the kids who grew up in its glow, reached early adulthood. Suddenly the cramped confines of tenement life, with people and storylines stacked on top of each other like cordwood, looked a lot sexier than Harper Valley. There were still plenty of station wagons on the small screen, but the shows that seemed to set the pace — shows like "Cheers," "N.Y.P.D. Blue," "L.A. Law," "Seinfeld," "Ally McBeal," "Frazier,"
"Homicide" and "Friends" — were all situated within city limits.

That arrangement proved to have a lot of advantages. It made it easier for characters to stay single longer, and dating is always good for dramatic or comedic churn. And whenever the action fell to a lull, or the writing got a little thin, the city itself was there to fill in the gaps, a full-fledged character that always looks great and always gets top billing. Maybe "Sex and the City" didn't really give the two subjects equal billing, but it came close: Carrie chose the latter over the former on more than one occasion.

During the subway years, invoking the suburbs became a way to show that a show (or a movie) was in on the joke — that it didn't really believe all that white-picket-fence fairy-tale happy-family nonsense about life amid the crabgrass. So what if John Cheever, John Updike, Richard Ford and so many others had so beautifully proven the point, so many times over, so many years before? Situating "The Simpsons" in Springfield, the same town in which Father Knew Best, was a way of commenting on Springfield — or Springfields, generic towns with generic names in generic states. On "Married ... With Children" the title itself was a sarcastic joke — something that was once supposed to sound appealing, repurposed as a code phrase for "kill me now."

The joke was on those boring, homogeneous suburbs, and the people in the city were telling it in the glamorous cocktail lounges, penthouses and private jets where of course all real city dwellers spend their free time.

YET today no one's snickering — certainly not network executives — at prime time's predominance of well-groomed lawns. Among the many offerings are "Weeds," "Big Love," a new season of "The Sopranos," dark takes all, along with fluffier but no less toxic shows like "Laguna Beach," and "The O.C." Not to mention all those home-makeover shows, all those nanny shows, half of those wife-swap shows, and "The Real Wives of Orange County," a three-fer attempt to combine reality, desperation and geography into a ratings hit.

So what changed? How did the youthful possibilities of new job, new guy, new apartment get replaced by a sense of grown-up obligations of mortgages, braces and college tuition? And how did we end up, in the first half of 2006, in a neighborhood crowded to overflow with pot-dealing PTA moms; hardware-store owners in multiple marriages; and tattooed, wiccan home-swappers?

Unquestionably, and self-consciously, Tony Soprano led the way: it's no accident that during his show's opening credits he leaves the city, hits the tollbooth, cruises through streets of tightly packed houses and finally up the driveway to his very own McMansion. "I think it is really important that the story takes place in the suburbs," said Carolyn Strauss, the president of HBO, who was talking on a cellphone right after dropping her kids off. "Tony is an aspirational guy who was approaching 40 and his business was troubled. He has problems with his kids and his marriage, everything that many people go through in America — except he was a mob boss."

National demographics have played an important role. Locked in S.U.V.'s waiting for a familiar exit to loom up out of the sea of brake lights, half the country now lives in suburbs. Small wonder that they might respond to exaggerated versions of themselves in weekly rotation. "With the suburbs," Ms. Strauss added, "there is a sort of shorthand that goes with it."

That goes for the people who make it as much as the people who write it. "I live on a street in Pasadena where the houses are cheek to jowl and you can't help but hear the little dramas that go on next door," said Mark V. Olsen, who, along with Will Scheffer, created "Big Love," HBO's new series about polygamy among the patios. "Mark and I both grew up in places like that," Mr. Scheffer said of its suburban setting. "It is part of our personal oeuvre." And they write what they know: while the youngest of the three wives on "Big Love" does not mind sharing a husband, she draws the line and says she needs her own car. This is the suburbs after all.

But the most important factor may turn out to be creative ennui. "Between 'Ally McBeal,' 'Frazier' and 'Sex and the City,' " said Marc Cherry, executive producer and creator of "Desperate Housewives," "it seemed like the whole urban thing had been done. It's only natural that writers wanting to do something fresh would turn their attention elsewhere. Why not do something about the suburbs?"

As Robert Greenblatt, president of entertainment of Showtime Networks said, "we all once believed in the bucolic ideal.

"I think we know by now that a lot of things went on behind those manicured lawns."

We also know by now that a lot of viewers, and a lot of Emmys, lie in wait.

Whatever the case, it's clear that television's long drive out of town has turned into a traffic jam, and it may not clear for a while. Stephen McPherson, the president of ABC Entertainment, gave the green light to "Desperate Housewives" then found himself inundated by similar pitches after the show soared in the ratings. "When we said yes to 'Desperate Housewives,' we weren't saying that we wanted something that was set in the suburbs," he said. "In the same way that there were a lot of mediocre imitations of 'Seinfeld' and 'Friends,' people need to find the next thing, not try to mimic what has already succeeded."

A Review from Entertainyourbrain.com

Sons & Daughters" Review

By Shawn McKenzie 04/03/2006

Everyone’s still mourning the loss of FOX’s “Arrested Development,” so when a funny show about an extended family arrives, sometimes it is unfairly attacked. In the case of ABC’s “Sons & Daughters,” I don’t feel that it warrants those attacks, because the two shows could not be more different.

Cameron Walker (Fred Goss) is a human resources rep who is happily married to his Jewish second wife, Liz (Gillian Vigman), and is the father of their two children with her…8-year-old Ezra (Noah Matthews) and four-year-old Marni (Alexandra “Lexi” Gold Jourden.) Cameron’s extended family is large and complicated. In addition to their two kids, Cameron’s bitter 14-year-old son Henry (Trevor Einhorn), from his first marriage to his bipolar ex-wife Paige (Melinda Allen), recently moved in with them two months ago. Henry is burgeoning filmmaker who is resentful of his father and new stepfamily, and he tortures them by filming pranks played on them and posting them on the Internet. Cameron was just recently fired from his job, which hurts Liz’s decision to go back to school to get her M.B.A. Cameron’s sister, Sharon Fenton (Alison Quinn), and her auto parts store owner and stage actor husband, Don (Jerry Lambert), are supposedly happily married…but Sharon and Don sleep in separate beds and have a sexless marriage (which everyone in the family knows about.) They have two teenaged children…bespectacled, brace-faced 13-year-old Carrie (Eden Sher) and her good-looking older brother Jeff (Randy Wayne.) Cameron and Sharon’s attractive younger stepsister, Jenna Halbert (Amanda Walsh)…the popular girl when she was in high school…had her career plans of being a singer sidetracked by becoming a single mom to her 4-year-old son named Danny (Nick Shafer) and working in a as a waitress in a coffee shop called Marjorie’s. She continues to be attracted to “bad” boys like the unemployed Tommy White, a.k.a. “Whitey” (Greg Pitts), the father to Danny; or a mover named Vick (Ryan Alosio)…and not to the nice guys…like Wylie Blake (Desmond Harrington), Jenna’s boss and the assistant manager of Marjorie’s, who is also attracted to her. The three siblings’ parents, Colleen (Dee Wallace), Cameron and Sharon’s mom, and Wendal (Max Gail), Jenna’s dad, are very dedicated to their adult children and their grandchildren but are going through some marital issues of their own. They have been married for 25 years, but Colleen, who tends to be a little passive-aggressive with people, is upset when Wendal reveals to Cameron in the pilot episode that he is thinking about leaving her. Wendal also struggles with the different relationships he has with his extended family members…including Aunt Rae (Lois Hall), Cameron’s Great Aunt, the gossipy anti-Semitic woman who lives with them (along with Jenna and Danny.) At a family barbeque, Colleen and Wendal announced to the family that they were separating, though they reunited following a hospital stay when Colleen had an angina attack.

Goss created the show with Nick Holly. Goss was on the Bravo show “Significant Others” for two seasons that employed the same style of half-scripted, half-improvisational comedy as this show does. In fact, I would argue that this show is much more similar to “Others” than to “AD.” While both this show and “AD” has extended family problems within their ranks, “AD” tended to be more “wacky” and this show can be actually dramatic sometimes. I’ve heard complaints about the show slipping into drama now and then…but I personally don’t have a problem with it. The only thing that matters is that everyone in this family cares for one another. I love the Bluths, but they aren’t exactly the most loving or caring family on television.

While the show primarily revolves around the universe of Cameron, it’s some of the supporting characters that stand out. Carrie is most definitely the standout character here. Everything that Sher says is so funny that I think that it is a crime that the actress isn’t used more often. She was used a lot in the first two episodes, but she is barely visible now. Assuming that this show sticks around for a second season, I bet we will be seeing more from her in the future. Whitey is the only character who always feels like a “sitcom” character, but since Pitts plays it so hilariously, I don’t mind that he feels a little out of place on this show.

Whether or not “AD” comes back to FOX or to another network, “Sons & Daughters” should not be the substitute for those fans. The show should be watched for what it is…a funny, touching show that just happens to be about a large family. The Bluths and the Walkers (and the Fentons, and the Halberts) can co-exist peacefully in the fact that they are two of the funniest families on television. If the ratings don’t improve though, the families will also both share an unfortunate similarity…cancellation.

An Interview with Fred Goss

Good Show, Bad News: An Interview with Sons & Daughters Creator Fred Goss
Written by Diane Kristine
Published April 12, 2006

"People are always saying 'oh, this crazy dysfunctional family,'" puzzled Fred Goss, the multitalented creator, writer, star and director of the midseason ABC show Sons & Daughters, which centers around that family people are talking about. "You know, I don't think they're that dysfunctional. Unless my family was totally different from everybody else's."

The show is a half-hour hybrid of improvisation and script, comedy and drama, about "the modern state of the extended family." Goss plays Cameron Walker, the central figure in this tangle of divorces, remarriages, half-siblings, single parenthood, long-lost fathers, smart-ass teens, and exposed secrets.

He and his partner, co-creator Nick Holly, drew on their own backgrounds to create the family tree populated with sympathetic characters who not only share a genetic pool, but the tendency to make the same mistakes.

"Our background has a lot of teen pregnancies. There's a lot of divorce in my family, a lot of repeating the same bad behavior without learning," said Goss. "Tons of stuff in the show is taken from personal experience."

The show examines everyday challenges through the lens of a supportive and loving family, though, so Goss' own family hasn't complained much. "The bottom line is that the people on the show love and care about each other," he added. "They might argue and lose patience, but they're in close proximity because they want to be."

Sons & Daughters is touching and wry at least as often as laugh-out-loud funny. "The show is about trying to find humor in the mundane or the sad," Goss said. The audience that embraced it reacted positively to that blend, with effusive viewer support on Goss' ABC blog as well as critical praise.

"Nothing seemed to help it as far as the numbers went"

But despite having his creative stamp all over a refreshingly creative, heartfelt, and entertaining show, Goss isn't celebrating. Because in TV, it's all about the ratings, and Sons & Daughters' ratings were more sad than mundane.

ABC put the show in what Goss called "a death spot" against formidable competition and without a strong lead-in to boost its numbers. It normally aired opposite House, which has been attracting over 20 million viewers lately, The Unit, an earlier midseason replacement earning strong ratings, and Scrubs, a similarly quirky comedy similarly struggling in that spot. Sons & Daughters lost even more of its viewers — and its potential to build momentum — when it aired against the competition-crushing American Idol.

Still, ABC stood by its plan to air weekly back-to-back episodes before a pre-emption by The Ten Commandments this week. A not-particularly-upbeat Goss hasn't given up hope that his show will get another chance, and that the one unaired episode will eventually be seen. "I think what they're wanting to do is to figure out a time to rerun the episodes in the early summer, and then they'll probably tag it on there as sort of a bonus episode," he said, before saying that while the ratings don't justify a second season, ABC's support allows for a bit of optimism.

"It really has been a collaboration with ABC from the start," he said, explaining that the network's president of entertainment, Stephen McPherson, approached him and Holly with the idea for the show after seeing an example of their improvisational approach. "They asked us to do it. That's why they've been so great. People don't believe me when I say how great they've been. They just think I'm kissing their butt. But they really have, because they wanted to try something new."

"They never thought this would change the face of television, it's just a different way to make a show"

What's innovative, though not entirely unique, about the show is its use of improvisation to create naturalistic dialogue. "I wanted to do a show where we used improvisation more like an Altman approach, where we use improvisation as our creative process, but we don't necessarily need you to know that it's improvised," Goss said.

ABC made sure viewers did know, however, by beginning the show with a verbal and written message that the dialogue was partially improvised - a "warning" Goss wasn't fond of. "It either looks like an apology or bragging," he laughed.

So what does it mean to be a writer on an improvised show? "Instead of just being this raw improv from the actors, its more like we're all writing it on the fly, both in front of the camera and behind it," Goss said.

"There are no jokes in the script. There's no dialogue in the script. What we'll do is we'll write the basic story first, so everything makes sense and we know what the drive is. Then we go through and we start to analyze what can you possibly do to get comedy out of this," he explained. "Then we'll do another pass where we go through and say 'let's work in a couple of good physical bits.'"

The actors are presented with a thorough description of what each scene is supposed to achieve. "How they go about it and the words they use to do it are up to them, for the most part," Goss said. "We'll get halfway through shooting and we'll let the actors do their thing at first. And then if we're not quite there yet, we'll start to mould it from behind the camera and say 'why don't you try saying this' or literally 'I need you to say this' because that's going to be the line that takes us to the next scene."

The process results in a lot of footage - between 12 and 14 hours for each 22-minute show. "It becomes like a puzzle, where the pieces change depending on who's putting them together, because there's no one way to put an episode together," he said. "There are multiple ways to do it. There's a lot of bad ways and there's a few good ways."

Goss, who is also an editor, would work with the show's editors or assemble some scenes himself. "It's a two-week process where it slowly starts to come together the way you picture it in your head," he added.

"What they really needed to do was to put us with something that gave us a big lead-in number"

The use of improv, the extended family focus, and a viewer-as-fly-on-the-wall sensibility lend themselves to the easy - and lazy - way to write a review: "It's like Arrested Development meets Curb Your Enthusiasm and they go have drinks with The Office." Except while it may have shades of all of those shows, it really emulates none of them, and the comparisons may have hurt more than helped.

Audiences tuning in looking for a sitcom filled with joke after setup would instead find a show that touched the heart as much as the funny bone. Goss pointed to ABC's Emmy-winning success with half-hour dramedy The Wonder Years, which ended its run in 1993, but the form's relative rarity on network TV has perhaps contributed to its struggle. Half-hour non-sitcoms often clash with audience expectations after they see promos highlighting the comedy and ignoring the drama, and with networks' expectations for ratings.

Whether the show returns or not, Goss said NBC Universal, the studio that produces Sons & Daughters, is eager to put out a DVD, likely this summer. "There are so many great things we couldn't put in because of network standards. Even things that aren't dirty, but alternate takes that were just as good as what we used, but you have to choose one."

If you want to show ABC your support for the show, write them at:

Sons & Daughters
ABC Audience Relations
500 S. Buena Vista Street
Burbank, CA 91521-4551

Oh, and watch it if it returns.

For a Page dedicated to Sons & Daughters go to http://www.wchstv.com/abc/sonsanddaughters/

For a Website dedicated to Fred Goss go to http://fredgoss.com/

For a Website dedicated to Amanda Walsh go to http://amandawalshfan.tripod.com/main.htm

For another Amanda Walsh Website go to http://www.amandawalsh.net/

For a Website dedicated to Nick Shafer go to http://www.nick.sweetgiggles.net/

For a Website dedicated to Dee Wallace go to http://officialdeewallace.com/

For more on Sons & Daughters go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sons_&_Daughters_(US_TV_series)