Almost Family

Easily the most promising series of the fall broadcast season: funny, poignant, and drenched in the chemistry between three charismatic actresses playing women who suddenly learn they're sisters.

The cutesy new-sisters vibe sits awkwardly next to the dad’s-accused-of-sexual-assault plot.

"Almost Family" is also a snooze. It sleepwalks past the issues it purports to explore, as well as the unethical, and most likely criminal, behavior involved. ... So "Almost Family" made Hutton's Bechley an almost-loveable rogue, and his offspring almost-unbothered by the almost crime he perpetrated against them and countless others. No "almost" about that. It's flat-out creepy.

Almost Family doesn’t really want to deal with female anger, or the revolting nature of its own premise. Instead, it aims to spin stories about community and family that are just so darn heartwarming, we’ll forget they’re all based on a fertility felony. Like everything else about this show, it just doesn’t work.

Almost Family gets credit for taking the biggest swing at a premise, and for whiffing it with gusto: What if we did This Is Us, but with medical rape? Once you learn the plot of Almost Family, the tone it takes is patently outrageous. ... Is it possible to move beyond aghast feelings over the premise and tone, and judge the series on its other merits? A Jason Katims superfan, surely I would be seduced by the show’s sweetness and emotionality anyway, right? Well... no. I couldn’t make the leap.

In attempting to jump past the inhumanity to arrive at unearned lessons about how family can be frustrating but rewarding, “Almost Family” reveals itself as a show with nothing to say at all.

It is tonally dissonant in the most extreme sense, a case of two wildly incompatible concepts crushed together so inelegantly that the result is a morally reprehensible, skin-crawling drama.