The Winner: About Two Boys
Man and Child Grow Up and Face the ’90s
Watching Fox’s latest live-action sitcom The Winner is reminiscent of watching the hit 2002 British film About a Boy. That movie stars Hugh Grant as a womanizing, handsome, 30-something-year-old cad who gets schooled in being a man by a precocious 12-year-old, played by Nicholas Hoult. In the TV version on Fox billed as “The Creator of Family Guy Strikes Again” (that creator being Seth MacFarlane), Daily Show alum Rob Corddry plays a womanless, nerdy, 30-something-year-old TV fanatic who learns how to be a man alongside the precocious 14-year-old son of his first and current love from childhood. Grant may not be sweet on his boy companion’s mum in the movie, but the similarities between these two plots remain clear.
What makes the sitcom an enjoyable treat is the engaging and amusingly candid relationship between Corddry’s title character, Glen Abbott, and his perennial crush’s son, Josh McKellar, acted by Keir Gilchrist. In the first two installments of the six-episode debut season, the pair tackle the mysterious realm of male-female relationships while emboldening each other to actually ask a member of the opposite sex out on a date, and in the case of Glen, visit a Korean “massage parlor” to work on his “intimacy” skills. That’s pretty heavy stuff for an uncompromisingly lazy guy of 32 who is still a virgin and has only kissed one girl, namely Josh’s divorced doctor mom Alison (Erinn Hayes)—and that was just a single time when they were both in junior high.
Glen’s parents, portrayed by fellow Massachusetts native Lenny Clarke (Rescue Me‘s Uncle Teddy) and Broadway veteran Linda Hart, increase the show’s likability through their alternatively exasperated (dad) and fawning (mom) interactions with their only manchild. As Glen informs viewers in the opening voiceover narration, his adolescent tale of late-blooming maturation takes place 23 years ago in the bustling mid-1990s, right after Josh and his mother move back to Glen’s longtime neighborhood—where he still lives with his parents—and long before he became the present-day richest man in Buffalo, New York. Some may think the premise sounds derivative and inherently juvenile, yet the finished product is anything but thanks primarily to Corddry and Gilchrist’s camaraderie, made possible by some very funny writing, as well as Corddry’s dexterously hammy body language. The Winner is one all-too-brief midseason replacement that definitely deserves to catch on and return for a second, fuller season.
The Verdict: A-
The Winner currently airs Sundays on Fox at both 8:30pm and 9:30pm EST
The Winner photo courtesy of Fox
