Watching Sitcoms

I’ve been watching the new episodes of Back To You. Like anyone else, I’d been looking forward to the new eps, even if just to have something to watch after the dry spell of the strike. But then, they weren’t as funny as I thought they would be. Maybe I was asking for too much, expecting more because of the long wait.

Don’t get me wrong, there were some funny moments, but they definitely seemed to be going for the easy laughs. And by that, I mean one episode centered on the death of an older news reporter, and Kelly (Patricia Heaton) is asked to do a eulogy, although she has no idea why. What everyone else knows and she doesn’t is that the man had told everyone they were having an affair. There were just a lot of cheap shots using the words of her eulogy. One bright spot was when Chuck (Kelsey Grammer) offers to babysit Gracie (Laura Marano), who doesn’t know he is really her father. The chemistry between the two of them is lovely to watch.

Then, in the last episode, entitled “Wall of Fame,” sportscaster Marsh (Fred Willard) throws a party, vaguely in Chuck’s honor. Gary (Ty Burrell) and Ryan (Josh Gad) spend the entire episode wandering around Marsh’s home gazing at racy pictures of Marsh and his wife, painted like murals on the wall. Kelly, meanwhile, notices she and Chuck in an intimate embrace in the background of a photograph hanging on Marsh’s wall. She spends the entire time trying to hide the picture so no one else will see the incriminating evidence.

Honestly, I’m not even sure what the outcome was, because I sorta lost interest and started doing something else. But the saddest part for me was that this episode was conspicuously missing weathergirl Montana (Ayda Field) and had a new actor as Gracie. I don’t know who she was, because I can’t seem to find anything, outside of chatter on forums, that explains why or with whom they replaced Laura Marano.

If you ask me, it’s a real shame, too, because as far as I was concerned, Laura’s interaction with Kelsey was pretty much the only highlight of the new episodes and the one thing I was interesting in watching develop on the series.