Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Upshaws’ On Netflix, A Sitcom About A Working-Class Family Dealing With All Sorts Of Drama

The ’90s were rife with sitcoms that had a bumbling husband and a long-suffering wife. Some of these couples had families, and some didn’t (most did, though). The Upshaws harks back to those days, but makes things more complex by giving the bumbling husband a complicated personal life. But does it modernize the family sitcom or make us feel like we’re in a time warp back to 1993?

THE UPSHAWS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Bennie Upshaw (Mike Epps) serves his six-year-old daughter Maya (Journey Christine) breakfast. She tells him she loves it when he serves breakfast, and proceeds to pour syrup in her cereal.

The Gist: Bennie is a mechanic who lives near Indianapolis with his wife Regina (Kim Fields) and daughters Maya and Aaliyah (Khali Spraggins). They both work, and they’re barely scraping by, but there’s lots of love in the family and the kids want for nothing. In fact, Regina is putting together a big birthday party for Aaliyah’s 13th birthday, and she’s given Bennie just one task: Book the hot party space in town.

Let’s just say that Bennie, a well-meaning guy who, well, has some bad follow-through problems. He has put off booking the Lotus Room until the last minute, something Regina’s sister Lucretia (Wanda Sykes) knew would happen. Lucretia and Bennie aren’t each others’ biggest fans, but she laid out money to help him start his auto repair shop and she and her sister are very close, so she and Bennie spend a lot of time hurling insults at each other.

Because the party space Regina wanted was booked, Bennie ends up using the VFW hall that his old Army buddies booked for a “you’ve been sprung” party for their friend Duck (Page Kennedy), who found Jesus in prison. But when everyone gets there, the place is decorated for Duck’s party, complete with stripper poles. Regina and Lucretia are horrified, but Aalyiah and her friends love it. Even Bernard Jr. (Khali Spraggins), whom Bennie and Regina had when they were 15, is there; Bernard has more or less cut Bennie out of his life, mainly because his father was never there for him growing up.

There’s a complication, though; Tasha (Gabrielle Dennis), the mother of his son Kelvin (Diamond Lyons), is throwing him a 13th birthday party, too. Yes, Bennie got Tasha pregnant when he and Regina were “on a break”, and Kelvin is only a few weeks older than Aaliyah. Kelvin is starting to run with the wrong crowd and get in some trouble, no thanks to Tasha’s permissive parenting, and Bennie is starting to feel that the boy needs to be around him more often. But first, he needs to figure out how to be two places at once.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Upshaws has a very ’90s family sitcom feel, combining the “well-meaning screw up” vibe of a show like Martin with the family aspect of something like Hanging With Mr. Cooper.

Our Take: Sykes created The Upshaws with sitcom veteran Regina Hicks (Girlfriends, Insecure, Sister Sister), and the show’s retro feel is likely on purpose. There is a need for a sitcom that features a Black, middle-class family that doesn’t necessarily cater to kids. There’s a reason why the show is TV-14, besides the language (the word “shit” is thrown around a lot); Bennie’s life is complicated, and the fact that he has two kids around the same age via two different women is just a part of it.

It’s that level of complication that makes The Upshaws intriguing, but the show is brought down by tired jokes and situations that should have been left in the ’90s (or, more accurately, the ’80s). While it feels somewhat modern to have the patriarch of a sitcom family have kids with other women, or have a strained relationship with an adult child they had when they were teenagers, Sykes, Hicks and the writing staff seem to couch that in tropes that feel pretty moldy.

Bennie has to hide the fact that he’s going to Kelvin’s party by saying he’s getting ice? Listen, it seems that Regina has grudgingly accepted the idea that her husband’s “baby mama” is in their lives, so we’re not sure why Kelvin hasn’t been hanging around his father and half-sisters more. There’s a scene at Aaliyah’s party, that Bennie decided to invite Kelvin and Tasha to after seeing Kelvin’s party was mostly populated with adults, where Aaliyah and Kelvin talk to each other like strangers, not like they’re siblings. Of course, it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that the two of them barely know each other, but it feels more like a setup than something that’s just a distressing fact of Bennie’s life.

There’s also the issue of Lucretia and Bennie hurling insults at each other, a sitcom tradition that’s as old as TV itself. There’s always some buttinsky in-law that makes comments about how much of clod the main character is, and there’s always a verbal back and forth. Will we find out at some point that the two of them actually feel like family to each other and (gulp!) care for one another? That always seems to be the way this goes, where there’s an actually touching scene between these two supposed enemies, then they go back to the insults like nothing happened.

All of this is our way of saying that, despite the fact that The Upshaws is chock full of sitcom vets in front of and behind the camera, and it has a main character with an interesting, complicated life, it wastes them all with plots and dialogue that were groan inducing a quarter-century ago.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: When the strippers show up for Duck’s party, Bennie says he’s going to stay back and clean up. “What you gonna do?” Regina asks, knowing the answer he should give. “I’m gonna clean up at home,” Bennie says, which is the right answer.

Sleeper Star: Hard to call Kim Fields a “sleeper”, given that she’s been on TV since she was a kid, starring in two classic sitcoms and a season of The Real Housewives of Atlanta. But we hope she has more to do here and not just play the “long suffering wife” role.

Most Pilot-y Line: Speaking of Kim Fields, why would Sykes and Hicks name her character “Regina”? Is this some subtle reference to her character in Living Single or just a coincidence?

Our Call: SKIP IT. The Upshaws has “good sitcom bones”, but is so saddled with tired plots and dialogue it just makes for a show that feels like it’s already stale, even though it just started.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream The Upshaws On Netflix