Critic Reviews

There's humor, there's heart, you'll laugh when you don't expect to.

The Goodwin Games will have to consistently match the cleverness and poignancy of its pilot to win in the long run. Coming from the creators of How I Met Your Mother, there's reason to hope.

True, it may be a little too high-concept, but it held my attention much better than plenty of other, much worse TV comedies.

The surprise is that at least from the peppy pilot, it’s possible that this might actually work reasonably well.

The first episode isn’t riotous (truly hilarious pilots are rarer than... even truly hilarious sitcoms), but it’s confident and charming and the characters seem fully formed.

Goodwin Games isn’t an Olympian comedy but it’s by no means an out-and-out clunker either.

It's sweet in spots (mainly in scenes involving Miller's ex-con man-child trying to reconnect with his daughter), and the idea has potential, even though this is a premise pilot that has to spend so much time introducing the siblings and the competition that none of it's fully realized.

Instead of wink-winking at the audience about its own cleverness, The Goodwin Games mostly keeps things moving along at a snappy pace, with jokes as well. When the show gets too pleased with its own eccentricity, though, it becomes grating.

It’s only too bad the writers (Carter Bays, Craig Thomas, Chris Harris) don’t start by grounding their charges with a little more humanity; instead, the trio proves so mismatched and exaggerated as to have a very long way to reach any sort of common ground.

The Goodwin Games isn't a sophisticated comedy by any means, and memorable quips are few and far between, but its overall lightheartedness manages to save it from becoming completely dull.