Call Your Mother

Once she is indefinitely ensconced in the comfy AirBnB-esque guest house run by quasi-love interest Danny (Patrick Brammall, “No Activity”) and the other characters, including Austin Crute as Jackie’s roommate and Emma Caymares as Freddie’s girlfriend, have entered their mutual orbits, things relax and improve.

Reduces The Closer's formidable Kyra Sedgwick to a clingy and neurotic noodge. [18-31 Jan 2021, p.10]

Sedgwick breezes through the scenes as if she has been playing something like this for years but Lizer doesn’t give much motivation for her characters’ moves. ... Throwing in a few more Iowa references (we’ve got plenty of them) would help “Mother” distinguish itself from dozens of similar comedies. “Bless This Mess” took its “Green Acres” plot, infused it with a big helping of Nebraska and found a way to thrive. “Call Your Mother” could do the same thing.

The series hits in its pilot episode — the only one made available to critics — notes that are alternately too familiar or jarring for the wrong reasons. The show has a pleasant warmth, but it seems to have too little of a sense about what within it works to find its footing.

Ms. Sedgwick seems positioned to carry most of the burden, and other than Jean being meddlesome or looking for a sex life—or delivering mawkish soliloquies about the importance of family—there aren’t any obvious avenues to be followed. On the other hand, only the one episode was available for review, so they might fool us all. Let’s hope.

Jean is thus far easily the show’s least interesting character, despite the inherent desperation of her show-launching move. The premiere of the laugh-tracked, multi-cam Call Your Mother is nearly all table-setting, stock characters and unfunny jokes. ... If the show is too timid to give its protagonist any flaws other than “loving her children too much,” it’s at least auspicious in exploring how her helicopter parenting has affected her children, especially their relationship to each other.

There are some sitcoms that have first episodes that are so bad, there isn’t even a glimmer that you can identify that will make you think the show can find itself. Call Your Mother is one of those shows.