My Weekday Fling: My Boys, Season One (6)

If you are not a baseball fan, or have a low tolerance for sports metaphor, skip this one.

If you like sports, metaphor, and sports metaphor (or at least you can deal with some combination thereof), then you get to meet PJ (Jordana Spiro), the Cubs correspondent for the Chicago Sun Times, and her boys: Andy (Jim Gaffigan), her married brother; Mike (Jamie Kaler), her one-step-away-from-being-creepy friend; Kenny (Michael Bunin), her mostly-lovable yet loveless friend; Brendan (Reid Scott), her radio host best friend/sometimes roommate/should be or could be love interest; and Bobby (Kyle Howard), her fellow reporter for a different paper, possible but didn’t work out love interest. Preventing testosterone overload is her other best friend Stephanie (Kellee Stewart), a magazine editor. PJ’s great love is baseball and views her life (or at least talks about her life in the voice-over) as a corollary of the game; this is her team. PJ narrates during each episode, providing the baseball correspondence to the life situation facing her and her friends.

It is the everyday ups and downs that the characters face: dates, minor misunderstandings, lost jobs, lost games. None of the scenarios are overly intense or overly exaggerated; so expect neither melodrama nor farce. Essentially, this is a show about basically descent people who enjoy each other’s company. Doesn’t mean that they don’t rag on each other, but there is no snide tone underlying everything or any self-righteous proselytizing.

In a sense there is something wholesome (without being completely cheesy) about My Boys: the storylines are recognizable and relatable, the characters are easy to like, and it is easy to see that they like each other.

The actors work well together, and the writing (banter and burns) improves as the season progresses. The lighting design is very soft, making the whole appearance of the show more approachable. The various guest stars are notable without being obnoxious.

I couldn’t be more thankful both for my recent trip to Chicago and for my awesome friend KP’s walking tour of the city, because I actually have a general sense of the geography and places the characters talk about. It can be difficult when you are totally unfamiliar with a show’s setting.

I do have to point out one thing that got under my skin. The literary allusion “albatross” is misused. I understand that not everyone has been required to read "The Rhyme of The Ancient Mariner” as I was (repeatedly), but I beg that people would just sit down and watch Serenity in which the common mistake is addressed and corrected.

It is the summer, so if you want to take a break and have a beer, My Boys would be fine company.

The TV Girl