Critic Reviews

At times the pop-culture references threaten to turn into a Dennis Miller routine, grabbing everything from the Rolling Stones to the Menendez brothers.

Mr. Rhodes is the funniest of the new season's comic-playing-a-maverick-teacher-fighting-a-school-bureaucracy sitcoms. [30 Sep 1996]

Like TV teachers back to the time of "Room 222" and beyond, Mr. Rhodes is depicted as the one teacher in the school who really knows what kids need and want, who will constantly have to buck an unfeeling, insensitive bureaucracy and a staff of stodgy, disapproving older teachers. [23 Sep 1996, p.E1]

Ron Glass' Ronald Felcher, history teacher, should have the star billing. He's the only light, and right, in a faculty lounge of stereotypical teacher put-downs. [23 Sep 1996, p.1]

Eminently predictable, monumentally derivative. [09 Sep 1996]

Mr. Rhodes has many problems, starting with language and taste. [22 Sep 1996, p.F1]

Watching Tom Rhodes primp his way through Monday's debut of "Mr. Rhodes," a new sitcom on NBC, you may be excused for wondering, "How come I, (your name here), mild-mannered (your occupation here), don't have a starring role in a television series?" [23 Sep 1996, p.3C]

The most annoying presence yet in a fall season full of saddle burrs, Mr. Rhodes is classroom claptrap of the lowest order. [23 Sep 1996]

Whoever came up with "Mr. Rhodes" should be sent to detention. [23 Sep 1996, p.C9]

They have loaded up the show with plenty of sexual innuendo and slapstick humor, all of it second-rate and instantly tiresome. Rhodes himself has a style of delivery about half a beat behind the action that on TV comes across like a soundtrack always out of synch.