CBS premieres comedy The McCarthys—starring Tyler Ritter, son of John Ritter—on Thursday, Oct. 30, 9:30 p.m. The following are reviews from TV critics around the web, compiled by B&C.
“Creator Brian Gallivan has said he based the show on his life, and while that may be true, it feels much more like he based it on other sitcoms. The show reeks of prefabrication: the clingly, slightly crazy mother; the gruff but loving dad; the trampy sister; the dimwitted big brother.”
—Robert Bianco,USA Today
“Big and broad, CBS’ The McCarthys tries to bask in the glory of a fractious, colorful nuclear family from Boston (here pronounced Baaahston), with the mild twist that one of the grown sons is gay. The scenario yields all the expected gags, and leaves an able cast — including Tyler Ritter as the son and Laurie Metcalf as his mom — struggling to make much of it.”
—Brian Lowry,Variety
“On the other hand, no amount of endurance is going to make me come back for more of CBS's The McCarthys, which manages to be unfunny, dated and stereotypical all in under a half-hour.”
—Tim Goodman,The Hollywood Reporter
“As for the show itself, The McCarthys would have seemed progressive a few decades ago but now feels pretty tame.”
—Alan Sepinwall, HitFix
“How much enjoyment you get out of The McCarthys will depend on your tolerance for badly rendered Boston accents and whether you’ve maxed out on gay-centric sitcoms that traffic in clichés.”
—Neil Genzlinger,New York Times
“With The McCarthys, CBS has one of those atavistic comedies that reaches back to the earliest days of the form, and a star who may invoke in some viewers a long-buried pleasure reflex -- a reflex they may have first discovered watching his father more than 30 years ago. That's not a bad strategy, while The McCarthys -- good-natured, old-fashioned, unchallenging -- isn't a bad sitcom, just an obvious one.”
—Verne Gay, Newsday
