Tracy Morgan has fetched up in a multicamera, filmed-before-a-live-audience situation comedy, “Crutch.” Premiering Monday on Paramount+, it’s a cousin, in textual and corporate terms, to the CBS sitcom “The Neighborhood,” from which it has been spun off, and though it includes some words you can’t say on broadcast TV and has a streaming-length, eight-episode season, it’s for all intents and purposes a network sitcom — good-hearted, familial and even less risqué than most.
Seven seasons of “30 Rock” have firmly conflated Morgan in my mind with Tracy Jordan, the character he played there, a personage so singular one would think it must somehow be an accurate depiction of the actual Morgan. “We’re a team now,” Tracy says to Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon in that series’ opening episode, “like Batman and Robin, like chicken and a chicken container.” I can’t imagine any other actor getting away with that line. Obviously, there’s more to Morgan than Jordan — he’s a stand-up comic, has been in a lot of movies and was a “Saturday Night Live” cast member from 1996 to 2003. The 2018 TBS dramatic comedy “The Last O.G.” lasted four seasons — it also featured “The Neighborhood” star Cedric the Entertainer — and cast Morgan as an ex-con, reckoning with a gentrified Brooklyn after 15 years in prison.
Here he plays Francois “Crutch” Crutchfield, widower, father and grandfather and the owner of a Harlem flooring company. Morgan had guested on “The Neighborhood” as the brother of Cedric’s character; in “Crutch,” he’s become a cousin, with a few appearances by Cedric to cement the relationship. (Arsenio Hall and a very funny Deon Cole also make guest appearances.) Jealous of his peace and his space, and his money, he’s looking forward to the time when “I can finally do me” — plans that are upset with the unexpected return of his adult children to the nest. (Sitcom premise No. 310.)
Son Jake (Jermaine Fowler), having graduated Columbia Law School at the top of his class and passed the bar on his first try, decides to quit his high-paying job at a corporate firm to work for Legal Aid, leaving a fancy Manhattan apartment — with free parking — to move back home. (It’s a unilateral decision.) Daughter Jamilah (Adrianna Mitchell), newly (and for a moment, secretly) separated from her husband, arrives from Minnesota for an indefinite visit with her children, Lisa (Braxton Paul) and Mase (Finn Maloney). Not technically living at Crutch’s but around all the time (she scores a key in the opening episode) is his sister-in-law, Antoinette (Kecia Lewis), called Toni, an acerbic bird-watching corrections officer, with whom Crutch trades insults like Sherman Hemsley and Marla Gibbs in “The Jeffersons,” if not quite at that level of wit. (Toni: “For somebody who ate as many lead chips as you, you did pretty good”; Crutch: “Why don’t you stop flapping your gums and flap your wings back to your cave?”) Well, it’s a big brownstone, and it’s convenient to have as many characters as possible on a single set.
Rounding out the company is Adrian Martinez as Flaco, “the manager, sales associate, customer service rep [and] HR” at Crutch’s flooring store, a sweet, sensitive goof. Luenell recurs as Miss Pearl, who looks down from a neighboring building on Crutch’s rooftop garden — a wonderful set, from production designer Katie Akana — tossing out comments like a drunk Muppet: “This body broke up New Edition” and “Every time y’all on that roof, it’s drama. This better than that dragon s—.”
Unlike Morgan’s “Last O.G.” character, Crutch hasn’t been out of circulation, but, like many television fathers, he lives in a generational bubble, and there is a modicum of Kids These Days and What’s the World Coming To humor, along with nostalgic references to Doug E. Fresh and the Fat Boys (“Today they’d be called the Plus-Sized Boys,” says Flaco). There’s a sweet scene in which Crutch and Flaco give Minnesota-raised Lisa and Mase lessons in how to ride the subway; an episode in which Jamilah tries too hard to get the kids into a theater camp; adventures in bird-watching with Toni and Jake; a visit to prison to confront a convict (Cole) “so confident when he robbed bodegas he would feed the cat on the way out.” Becky Ann Baker, who was Jean Weir on “Freaks and Geeks” plays another maternal Midwesterner as Jamilah’s mother-in-law, Kathy, who is popular with everyone.
The question here is whether a show can be funny if the jokes are … not great or kind of hacky. And the answer seems to be it can, if the actors are amusing apart from what they’re made to say, and the situations sufficiently engaging, and you are flexible with your definition of “funny” — that is, if you don’t need to be laughing all the time. That said, this is an appealing series, running on love and goodness and right behavior, with a host of likable performers, Morgan especially, who has the quality of being at once devilish and angelic, a grumbling saint. That Crutch, for all his bluster, is a softy, is a point the series explicitly makes. Called upon to share his feelings, he says: “In my days, men just held it in.” “That’s why they all died at 56,” replies Jake. (Morgan is 56.)
But feelings will be shared.
Tracy Morgan has fetched up in a multicamera, filmed-before-a-live-audience situation comedy, “Crutch.” Premiering Monday on Paramount+, it’s a cousin, in textual and corporate terms, to the CBS sitcom “The Neighborhood,” from which it has been spun off, and though it includes some words you can’t say on broadcast TV and has a streaming-length, eight-episode season, it’s for all intents and purposes a network sitcom — good-hearted, familial and even less risqué than most.
Seven seasons of “30 Rock” have firmly conflated Morgan in my mind with Tracy Jordan, the character he played there, a personage so singular one would think it must somehow be an accurate depiction of the actual Morgan. “We’re a team now,” Tracy says to Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon in that series’ opening episode, “like Batman and Robin, like chicken and a chicken container.” I can’t imagine any other actor getting away with that line. Obviously, there’s more to Morgan than Jordan — he’s a stand-up comic, has been in a lot of movies and was a “Saturday Night Live” cast member from 1996 to 2003. The 2018 TBS dramatic comedy “The Last O.G.” lasted four seasons — it also featured “The Neighborhood” star Cedric the Entertainer — and cast Morgan as an ex-con, reckoning with a gentrified Brooklyn after 15 years in prison.
Here he plays Francois “Crutch” Crutchfield, widower, father and grandfather and the owner of a Harlem flooring company. Morgan had guested on “The Neighborhood” as the brother of Cedric’s character; in “Crutch,” he’s become a cousin, with a few appearances by Cedric to cement the relationship. (Arsenio Hall and a very funny Deon Cole also make guest appearances.) Jealous of his peace and his space, and his money, he’s looking forward to the time when “I can finally do me” — plans that are upset with the unexpected return of his adult children to the nest. (Sitcom premise No. 310.)
Son Jake (Jermaine Fowler), having graduated Columbia Law School at the top of his class and passed the bar on his first try, decides to quit his high-paying job at a corporate firm to work for Legal Aid, leaving a fancy Manhattan apartment — with free parking — to move back home. (It’s a unilateral decision.) Daughter Jamilah (Adrianna Mitchell), newly (and for a moment, secretly) separated from her husband, arrives from Minnesota for an indefinite visit with her children, Lisa (Braxton Paul) and Mase (Finn Maloney). Not technically living at Crutch’s but around all the time (she scores a key in the opening episode) is his sister-in-law, Antoinette (Kecia Lewis), called Toni, an acerbic bird-watching corrections officer, with whom Crutch trades insults like Sherman Hemsley and Marla Gibbs in “The Jeffersons,” if not quite at that level of wit. (Toni: “For somebody who ate as many lead chips as you, you did pretty good”; Crutch: “Why don’t you stop flapping your gums and flap your wings back to your cave?”) Well, it’s a big brownstone, and it’s convenient to have as many characters as possible on a single set.
Rounding out the company is Adrian Martinez as Flaco, “the manager, sales associate, customer service rep [and] HR” at Crutch’s flooring store, a sweet, sensitive goof. Luenell recurs as Miss Pearl, who looks down from a neighboring building on Crutch’s rooftop garden — a wonderful set, from production designer Katie Akana — tossing out comments like a drunk Muppet: “This body broke up New Edition” and “Every time y’all on that roof, it’s drama. This better than that dragon s—.”
Unlike Morgan’s “Last O.G.” character, Crutch hasn’t been out of circulation, but, like many television fathers, he lives in a generational bubble, and there is a modicum of Kids These Days and What’s the World Coming To humor, along with nostalgic references to Doug E. Fresh and the Fat Boys (“Today they’d be called the Plus-Sized Boys,” says Flaco). There’s a sweet scene in which Crutch and Flaco give Minnesota-raised Lisa and Mase lessons in how to ride the subway; an episode in which Jamilah tries too hard to get the kids into a theater camp; adventures in bird-watching with Toni and Jake; a visit to prison to confront a convict (Cole) “so confident when he robbed bodegas he would feed the cat on the way out.” Becky Ann Baker, who was Jean Weir on “Freaks and Geeks” plays another maternal Midwesterner as Jamilah’s mother-in-law, Kathy, who is popular with everyone.
The question here is whether a show can be funny if the jokes are … not great or kind of hacky. And the answer seems to be it can, if the actors are amusing apart from what they’re made to say, and the situations sufficiently engaging, and you are flexible with your definition of “funny” — that is, if you don’t need to be laughing all the time. That said, this is an appealing series, running on love and goodness and right behavior, with a host of likable performers, Morgan especially, who has the quality of being at once devilish and angelic, a grumbling saint. That Crutch, for all his bluster, is a softy, is a point the series explicitly makes. Called upon to share his feelings, he says: “In my days, men just held it in.” “That’s why they all died at 56,” replies Jake. (Morgan is 56.)
But feelings will be shared.
Tracy Morgan has fetched up in a multicamera, filmed-before-a-live-audience situation comedy, “Crutch.” Premiering Monday on Paramount+, it’s a cousin, in textual and corporate terms, to the CBS sitcom “The Neighborhood,” from which it has been spun off, and though it includes some words you can’t say on broadcast TV and has a streaming-length, eight-episode season, it’s for all intents and purposes a network sitcom — good-hearted, familial and even less risqué than most.
Seven seasons of “30 Rock” have firmly conflated Morgan in my mind with Tracy Jordan, the character he played there, a personage so singular one would think it must somehow be an accurate depiction of the actual Morgan. “We’re a team now,” Tracy says to Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon in that series’ opening episode, “like Batman and Robin, like chicken and a chicken container.” I can’t imagine any other actor getting away with that line. Obviously, there’s more to Morgan than Jordan — he’s a stand-up comic, has been in a lot of movies and was a “Saturday Night Live” cast member from 1996 to 2003. The 2018 TBS dramatic comedy “The Last O.G.” lasted four seasons — it also featured “The Neighborhood” star Cedric the Entertainer — and cast Morgan as an ex-con, reckoning with a gentrified Brooklyn after 15 years in prison.
Here he plays Francois “Crutch” Crutchfield, widower, father and grandfather and the owner of a Harlem flooring company. Morgan had guested on “The Neighborhood” as the brother of Cedric’s character; in “Crutch,” he’s become a cousin, with a few appearances by Cedric to cement the relationship. (Arsenio Hall and a very funny Deon Cole also make guest appearances.) Jealous of his peace and his space, and his money, he’s looking forward to the time when “I can finally do me” — plans that are upset with the unexpected return of his adult children to the nest. (Sitcom premise No. 310.)
Son Jake (Jermaine Fowler), having graduated Columbia Law School at the top of his class and passed the bar on his first try, decides to quit his high-paying job at a corporate firm to work for Legal Aid, leaving a fancy Manhattan apartment — with free parking — to move back home. (It’s a unilateral decision.) Daughter Jamilah (Adrianna Mitchell), newly (and for a moment, secretly) separated from her husband, arrives from Minnesota for an indefinite visit with her children, Lisa (Braxton Paul) and Mase (Finn Maloney). Not technically living at Crutch’s but around all the time (she scores a key in the opening episode) is his sister-in-law, Antoinette (Kecia Lewis), called Toni, an acerbic bird-watching corrections officer, with whom Crutch trades insults like Sherman Hemsley and Marla Gibbs in “The Jeffersons,” if not quite at that level of wit. (Toni: “For somebody who ate as many lead chips as you, you did pretty good”; Crutch: “Why don’t you stop flapping your gums and flap your wings back to your cave?”) Well, it’s a big brownstone, and it’s convenient to have as many characters as possible on a single set.
Rounding out the company is Adrian Martinez as Flaco, “the manager, sales associate, customer service rep [and] HR” at Crutch’s flooring store, a sweet, sensitive goof. Luenell recurs as Miss Pearl, who looks down from a neighboring building on Crutch’s rooftop garden — a wonderful set, from production designer Katie Akana — tossing out comments like a drunk Muppet: “This body broke up New Edition” and “Every time y’all on that roof, it’s drama. This better than that dragon s—.”
Unlike Morgan’s “Last O.G.” character, Crutch hasn’t been out of circulation, but, like many television fathers, he lives in a generational bubble, and there is a modicum of Kids These Days and What’s the World Coming To humor, along with nostalgic references to Doug E. Fresh and the Fat Boys (“Today they’d be called the Plus-Sized Boys,” says Flaco). There’s a sweet scene in which Crutch and Flaco give Minnesota-raised Lisa and Mase lessons in how to ride the subway; an episode in which Jamilah tries too hard to get the kids into a theater camp; adventures in bird-watching with Toni and Jake; a visit to prison to confront a convict (Cole) “so confident when he robbed bodegas he would feed the cat on the way out.” Becky Ann Baker, who was Jean Weir on “Freaks and Geeks” plays another maternal Midwesterner as Jamilah’s mother-in-law, Kathy, who is popular with everyone.
The question here is whether a show can be funny if the jokes are … not great or kind of hacky. And the answer seems to be it can, if the actors are amusing apart from what they’re made to say, and the situations sufficiently engaging, and you are flexible with your definition of “funny” — that is, if you don’t need to be laughing all the time. That said, this is an appealing series, running on love and goodness and right behavior, with a host of likable performers, Morgan especially, who has the quality of being at once devilish and angelic, a grumbling saint. That Crutch, for all his bluster, is a softy, is a point the series explicitly makes. Called upon to share his feelings, he says: “In my days, men just held it in.” “That’s why they all died at 56,” replies Jake. (Morgan is 56.)
But feelings will be shared.
Tracy Morgan has fetched up in a multicamera, filmed-before-a-live-audience situation comedy, “Crutch.” Premiering Monday on Paramount+, it’s a cousin, in textual and corporate terms, to the CBS sitcom “The Neighborhood,” from which it has been spun off, and though it includes some words you can’t say on broadcast TV and has a streaming-length, eight-episode season, it’s for all intents and purposes a network sitcom — good-hearted, familial and even less risqué than most.
Seven seasons of “30 Rock” have firmly conflated Morgan in my mind with Tracy Jordan, the character he played there, a personage so singular one would think it must somehow be an accurate depiction of the actual Morgan. “We’re a team now,” Tracy says to Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon in that series’ opening episode, “like Batman and Robin, like chicken and a chicken container.” I can’t imagine any other actor getting away with that line. Obviously, there’s more to Morgan than Jordan — he’s a stand-up comic, has been in a lot of movies and was a “Saturday Night Live” cast member from 1996 to 2003. The 2018 TBS dramatic comedy “The Last O.G.” lasted four seasons — it also featured “The Neighborhood” star Cedric the Entertainer — and cast Morgan as an ex-con, reckoning with a gentrified Brooklyn after 15 years in prison.
Here he plays Francois “Crutch” Crutchfield, widower, father and grandfather and the owner of a Harlem flooring company. Morgan had guested on “The Neighborhood” as the brother of Cedric’s character; in “Crutch,” he’s become a cousin, with a few appearances by Cedric to cement the relationship. (Arsenio Hall and a very funny Deon Cole also make guest appearances.) Jealous of his peace and his space, and his money, he’s looking forward to the time when “I can finally do me” — plans that are upset with the unexpected return of his adult children to the nest. (Sitcom premise No. 310.)
Son Jake (Jermaine Fowler), having graduated Columbia Law School at the top of his class and passed the bar on his first try, decides to quit his high-paying job at a corporate firm to work for Legal Aid, leaving a fancy Manhattan apartment — with free parking — to move back home. (It’s a unilateral decision.) Daughter Jamilah (Adrianna Mitchell), newly (and for a moment, secretly) separated from her husband, arrives from Minnesota for an indefinite visit with her children, Lisa (Braxton Paul) and Mase (Finn Maloney). Not technically living at Crutch’s but around all the time (she scores a key in the opening episode) is his sister-in-law, Antoinette (Kecia Lewis), called Toni, an acerbic bird-watching corrections officer, with whom Crutch trades insults like Sherman Hemsley and Marla Gibbs in “The Jeffersons,” if not quite at that level of wit. (Toni: “For somebody who ate as many lead chips as you, you did pretty good”; Crutch: “Why don’t you stop flapping your gums and flap your wings back to your cave?”) Well, it’s a big brownstone, and it’s convenient to have as many characters as possible on a single set.
Rounding out the company is Adrian Martinez as Flaco, “the manager, sales associate, customer service rep [and] HR” at Crutch’s flooring store, a sweet, sensitive goof. Luenell recurs as Miss Pearl, who looks down from a neighboring building on Crutch’s rooftop garden — a wonderful set, from production designer Katie Akana — tossing out comments like a drunk Muppet: “This body broke up New Edition” and “Every time y’all on that roof, it’s drama. This better than that dragon s—.”
Unlike Morgan’s “Last O.G.” character, Crutch hasn’t been out of circulation, but, like many television fathers, he lives in a generational bubble, and there is a modicum of Kids These Days and What’s the World Coming To humor, along with nostalgic references to Doug E. Fresh and the Fat Boys (“Today they’d be called the Plus-Sized Boys,” says Flaco). There’s a sweet scene in which Crutch and Flaco give Minnesota-raised Lisa and Mase lessons in how to ride the subway; an episode in which Jamilah tries too hard to get the kids into a theater camp; adventures in bird-watching with Toni and Jake; a visit to prison to confront a convict (Cole) “so confident when he robbed bodegas he would feed the cat on the way out.” Becky Ann Baker, who was Jean Weir on “Freaks and Geeks” plays another maternal Midwesterner as Jamilah’s mother-in-law, Kathy, who is popular with everyone.
The question here is whether a show can be funny if the jokes are … not great or kind of hacky. And the answer seems to be it can, if the actors are amusing apart from what they’re made to say, and the situations sufficiently engaging, and you are flexible with your definition of “funny” — that is, if you don’t need to be laughing all the time. That said, this is an appealing series, running on love and goodness and right behavior, with a host of likable performers, Morgan especially, who has the quality of being at once devilish and angelic, a grumbling saint. That Crutch, for all his bluster, is a softy, is a point the series explicitly makes. Called upon to share his feelings, he says: “In my days, men just held it in.” “That’s why they all died at 56,” replies Jake. (Morgan is 56.)
But feelings will be shared.
