Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Dinner With The Parents’ On Amazon Freevee, A Comedy Where A Weekly Family Dinner Regularly Goes Very Wrong

Every so often, a cast can transcend mediocre writing. It’s much harder to do in comedy than in drama, but when it happens, the material is elevated by some good cast chemistry as well as cast members that are experts at playing the characters they’re playing. This is the case with a new comedy on Amazon Freevee.

DINNER WITH THE PARENTS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A car pulls up to a house at night, and a man gets out, holding a neon-green squirt gun.

The Gist: David Langer (Henry Hall) is back at home for the Langers’ traditional Friday night dinner. It’s the first time he’s been there in awhile because he was studying for his PhD. But he’s there for a good reason: He’s introducing his girlfriend Kristin (Anoushka Chadha) to his family.

First order of business, though, is to squirt his younger brother Gregg (Daniel Thrasher), whom he calls “Whoopsie”, before Gregg gets him. Too late; the squirt gun is no match for Gregg’s Super Soaker.

David is warmly greeted by his parents; Harvey (Dan Bakkedahl) is wearing the shirt with his face on it that his sons gave as a gag gift, and has his Al Pacino impression ready, and Jane (Michaela Watkins) thinks that she hears wedding bells in David’s future. There’s also Jane’s mom, Nana (Carol Kane), who has a non-specific Eastern European accent and a natural ability to be inappropriate. Jane is making Buffalo wings since Kristin, a poet, is from Buffalo. She’s making mild ones for Harney, who has some major issues with spicy foods.

A slight problem occurs right before Kristin is due to show up, though; she FaceTimes David and breaks up with him. Unable to go back into the house and face his overbearing family with the news, he sees a Postmates delivery person named Destiny (Sarah Kameela Impey) and offers to pay her to pose as Kristin.

Somehow the ruse works for a little while, though Destiny increases the amount she wants as she realizes how nuts the Langers are. Gregg is determined to prove that whoever this woman is, she’s certainly not his brother’s girlfriend. To complicate matters, the Langers’ weird neighbor Donnie (Jon Glaser) shows up looking for the “pitza” Destiny was delivering to him. Nana gets stuck in her massage chair. Then Destiny reaches up to take down a picture of David as a kid and reveals that she’s pregnant. Instead of being freaked out, Harvey and Jane are overjoyed. How long can David keep this going?

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Dinner With The Parents is based on the UK comedy Friday Night Dinner, and this version, created by Jon Beckerman, has a similar feel to Life In Pieces (which perhaps not coincidentally also had Bakkedahl in its cast).

Our Take: The format of Dinner With The Parents is that every episode will have the Langers gathering for a Friday night dinner, with various invited and uninvited guests coming around, and things will go south quickly. In the second episode, Jane’s attention-grabbing sister Amy (Mircea Monroe) comes over and sends Jane into an insecure frenzy that ends up sending her tothe hospital. Harvey continues to bond with Amy’s husband Mitch (Karl Collins), and David and Gregg try to get the better of their prankster douchebag cousin Chet (Kaine Zajaz).

Because of this format, the show is inconsistent, perhaps because almost every episode is more or less a bottle episode. Situations that are funny in the limited environment where the series is set work well and generate some hearty laughs, but not every situation works.

It’s a great cast, and Watkins, Bakkedahl, Glaser and Kane are especially adept at making mildly funny material into laugh-out-loud moments. However, they’re all playing character types we’ve seen them play in the past. Hall and Thrasher’s characters are somewhat more undefined; Hall’s David is nerdy and academic, but just looks annoyed most of the time and Thrasher’s Gregg plays a generic younger-brother type who is just there to annoy David.

None of the plots are particularly fresh, but that doesn’t matter quite as much when the character-based jokes land, which they do much better in the second episode than they do in the first. There’s a bit of confusion as to David’s age and how he gets back into the Friday night dinner routine if he actually lives out of town. The Langers are Jewish — we see the boys’ bar mitzvah portraits prominently displayed in the house — but the Friday night dinners seem to be non-denominational. And it really doesn’t feel like one wacky situation feeds into the next.

All of this means that there is a particular inconsistency in the writing that can drive you a bit nuts if you’re not being entertained by what the Langers are doing. But it seems that, more often than not, the show is funny enough to push that lack of attention to detail more into the background.

Sex and Skin: In the second episode, Chet somehow manipulates David and Gregg to strip naked, and they run through the house chasing their cousin wearing their birthday suits.

Parting Shot: After Harvey pukes on David’s sweater (he ate a spicy wing by mistake), Jane starts pulling it off and asking, “So, dinner next Friday, everyone?” David replies in an annoyed tone, “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.” But… isn’t he flying back to wherever he lives?

Sleeper Star: Carol Kane is the sleeper star simply because she’s Carol Kane.

Most Pilot-y Line: Nana tells Jane to “go to your room,” Jane, of course, says that she’s an adult and that doesn’t work anymore. A back-and-forth ensues that actually gets less funny the longer it goes.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Dinner With The Parents is one of those shows that is elevated by the cast. Nothing about the show is particularly fresh or inventive, and some of the writing is maddeningly inconsistent. But the cast manages to take the material and make it funny.

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.