“We’re in the midst of a casting emergency. We’ve got to find a 7-foot-tall basketball player, and that’s tricky. A Serbian,” explains Jon Cryer as to why his phone keeps pinging during an interview. The actor, famous for 12 seasons of Two and a Half Men, was in a full-court press to get his new sitcom, Extended Family, running at full speed after a production pause due to the actors’ strike.
Cryer plays affable Jim Kearney, amicably split from dynamo crisis manager Julia Mariano (Timeless star Abigail Spencer). They’re proud “pillars of divorce society,” as Spencer says. Their kids, 13-year-old Grace (Sofia Capanna) and 11-year-old Jimmy Jr. (Finn Sweeney), stay at the house, called “the nest,” while mom and dad take turns living with them. It’s a slam-dunk setup until Julia announces she’s marrying Trey Taylor (Scrubs vet Donald Faison), the wealthy owner of the NBA’s Boston Celtics. Jim, a massive franchise fan, is suddenly spotting his wife in courtside seats.
“Unless you have a really evolved sense of self, this is not necessarily a great thing to see,” says series creator Mike O’Malley, a Boston native and the mind behind another show set in the basketball world, the lauded dramedy Survivor’s Remorse (2014–17). The new series is based on real-life lead Celtics owner “Wyc” Grousbeck, who took a shot at creating a blended fam with his new wife, her ex-husband, and their kids.
(Credit: Ron Batzdorff/NBC)
O’Malley was approached with the idea for the project during the pandemic by Grousbeck, his powerhouse wife Emilia Fazzalari (they married in 2017), and her former spouse George Geyer. They were all living together so the kids could see both parents during lockdown. The trio wrote a 27-page treatment that Grousbeck has called “a twisted version of The Brady Bunch or Modern Family.”
That concept was enough to bring Cryer back to sitcoms nine years after his run playing unhappily divorced Alan Harper opposite Charlie Sheen and then Ashton Kutcher (with Angus T. Jones as the “half”). “Jim is more certain of his wrong opinions than Alan,” Cryer says of his new character. “Alan was tentative and felt the victim in his relationship with his ex-wife.”
One thing that stays the same is Cryer’s all-in physical comedy, hilariously on display in the series premiere as Jim fails miserably when caring for Grace’s goldfish. “As a father myself who’s made a million mistakes, I have enormous empathy for it because there’s no way to do the right thing,” says Cryer. (He experienced a similar situation with his family’s guinea pig!) “Every parent has a picture of how they’re going to handle stuff. Then the world shows you how silly that was.”
If you’ve ever watched a sitcom, you can guess what happens — and that there’s an attempted cover-up. Trey thinks Jim and Julia should tell the kids the truth, to which they respond with laughter. “Being a parent isn’t Trey’s style,” Faison says. “He’s learning.” Faison, whose nine-season run on Scrubs overlapped with Two and a Half Men, has long wanted to work with Cryer. He admits he modeled his own high school persona after two characters: Dwayne Wayne (Kadeem Hardison) from the 1987–93 sitcom A Different World and Cryer’s kindhearted Duckie from the 1986 teen rom-com Pretty in Pink. “I felt like if I could be those two, I was safe,” Faison says. “They’re both very brave, very loyal.”
Cryer’s and Faison’s comedy chops have made the job a dream for Spencer, now in her sitcom-starring debut. “I am a mom, and I wanted to make something my son would watch and see people not doing divorce perfectly, but doing it well,” says the actress, who, like her costars, has been through a split. “Julia is dancing between the two men she loves in two totally different ways. The three of us are trying to work it out. Around the kids, they’re mature and adult. When the kids aren’t there, they’re the most immature.”
Extended Family, Series Premiere, Saturday, December 23, 8:30/7:30c, NBC
This is an abbreviated version of TV Guide Magazine’s Extended Family cover story. For more on the series and other must-see TV, pick up the issue, when it lands on newsstands on December 14.