“Something extraordinary is happening to me, something impossible.” – Jim Powell
I started watching No Ordinary Family with a few apprehensions. While I was deeply curious to check out Michal Chiklis’ return to television (he played Vic Mackey on The Shield, after all, one of the best and grittiest shows of all time), the idea of a “family friendly” show about a family that discovers it has super powers made me nervous that I’d want to hit the Lame Alarm pretty quickly and bailout.
I turned out to be very pleasantly surprised, as the pilot episode breezed by and I even found myself chuckling often and smiling frequently in between.
The setup to extraordinariness is that the Powell clan takes an ill-fated plane ride into the Amazon jungle so that they can share a little quality time (papa Jim, played by Chiklis, is trying to hold his family together you see). The plane crashes, and shortly after the gang returns to the states remarkably unscathed, each discovers that they have a specific range of superpowers.
On the home front, Jim is a self-described “ineffectual police artist,” whereas wife Stephanie (Julie Benz of Dexter fame) is a high-powered research scientist. It’s clear that things have been “off” with the fam for a while as everyone, including daughter Daphne (Kay Panabaker) and son JJ (Jimmy Bennett) are mostly off doing their own thing and have forgotten how to be a close-knit bunch.
Things get really fun when Jim begins to explore his powers, and I was reminded of the exhilarating early scenes in the first Tobey Maguire-era Spider Man in which he gleefully tries on his new spidey powers on for size (shazam!). Here, Jim first discovers that something’s afoot when he unknowingly stops a bullet with his hand when a thug goes berserk down at the police station. Later, he bribes a kid to take over a batting range, jacks the pitching machine up to 11, and has at it letting the balls come flying. “Uh… you’ve been taking magic classes at the learning annex?” best friend George (Romany Malco) asks when Jim brings him in on the (super) action. Malco is a particular standout, it should be noted. For example, I loved that when after running down Jim’s current slate of known superpowers, he implores him to tell Stephanie what’s going on, saying, “She’s your wife. Bring her into your cone of silence.”
Overall, the casting is spot on. It kind of feels like Chiklis, Benz, and even Malco have been “liberated” from much grimmer roles. Chiklis of course played a corrupt cop with a crushing weight of bad decisions and regret on his shoulders on The Shield, while Benz was the recently slain wife of serial killer (albeit the Robin Hood of serial killers) and even Malco, who was great fun as pot grower Conrad on Weeds, has been brought into a much sunnier atmosphere here.
There’s a lot of potential story to explore in the weeks ahead. Jim’s initial foray into crime fighting has gotten him on the radar of some of the wrong crowd, Stephanie can run really fast, while Daphne can hear people’s thoughts and JJ, who thought that he had been left out, turns out to have the super genius thing going on. Looks like there’s more coming from the direction of Stephanie’s research firm and its backers, which may involve a Heroes-like organization that knows what the deal is and has some evil conspiracy cooking up.
The culmination of the episode is not extraordinarily original: Jim tracks down some bad guys (one of which magically has superpowers himself) and gets into a scrape that he barely makes it out from, Herculean strength and speed or no. Still, the baddie’s weird shapeshifter powers were cool to behold. Meanwhile, Jim and Stephanie enter couples’ therapy (which formed the basis for the point-of-view voiceovers throughout the hour) and are trying to work on holding the family together. I’m sure the theme of the preciousness of family and those close to us, even in the face of “normalcy,” is something that will be hit on many times, but so far it has managed to not veer overly far into cheesy territory.
I found No Ordinary Family’s pilot to be energetic and entertaining and fun. It remains to be seen whether it can keep the formula up for the long term but I’ll be watching, and recommending it to those looking for a solid PG-range show that has a shot at pleasing both parents and kids.
More thoughts on the No Ordinary Family debut:
* “Just because you Twitter spy on me doesn’t mean you know everything.” – Daphne
* There seems to be a lot more shows (and show pilots) that involve crash landing planes these days, doesn’t there?
* It’s hilariously bizarre to see Chiklis patiently taking details from a woman so that he can drum up a police sketch. The ghost of Vic Mackey is howling at the moon in some fictional void!
* Great moment when Jim tries to leap between two buildings in the proverbial single bound but fails miserably and makes a crater in the pavement many stories below instead. “Okay!” George calls from above. “You can’t fly!”
* How many fans of The Shield, like me, couldn’t help cheering a little bit when Michael Chiklis dons his leather jacket and starts going after some perps (albeit in a slightly different format)?
* Have to love Jim getting a “lair with wi-fi” thanks to George’s help. Talk about a man cave!
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.