The Goldbergs follows an American family in the 1980s. The youngest son, Adam, documents their lives with his video camera and narrates his memories as an adult. The show features the talents of Wendi McLendon-Covey, Jeff Garlin, Sean Giambrone, Troy Gentile, Hayley Orrantia, and George Segal.
Sound interesting? Here’s what the critics think:
NY Daily News: “It’s not just that they’re caricatures, or that even the most prominent piece of ’80s music used in the pilot makes you wince. It’s the way every move and sentence feels like the easiest path to predictable gags.”
USA Today: “When The Goldbergs sticks to its loud, abrasive but loving family, it’s fine. It’s when it switches its focus to the ’80s, complete with a voice-over designed to point out every difference between that decade and our own, that it gets into trouble. Jokes about big hair, bad clothes and REO Speedwagon tapes can be amusing for a while, but as subjects for sitcoms, they don’t have the staying power of families and their struggles to grow without growing apart.”
TIME: “What it needs to make it a lasting family comedy and not a VH1 special is heart and a sense of its characters as individuals. It shows signs of the former, but the latter gets lost in the deafeningly loud pilot and the pop-culture-reference humor. I’ll check back on The Goldbergs, but what I’m seeing so far is too much like the kind of broad family sitcom I’d hope we’d left behind in, well, the ’80s.”
THR: “Between McLendon-Covey and Garlin nailing the parents, everything else is really gravy. As the narrator, Oswalt gets all the funny lines that speak mostly to nostalgia and the humor that comes from the way we were, how goofy the era looks in retrospect and all the love that seemed a little bit like torture at the time. Here’s to The Goldbergs not only bringing back the ’80s but adding some much-needed laughter to the fall lineup.”
What do you think? Have you watched The Goldbergs? Will you watch again? Would you recommend it?
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