In its first two installments, that’s the case for Fox’s new drama “Almost Family,” a show whose attempts to introduce tonal variation and lightness only emphasize how grues…
” strives to be a drama about a woman who discovers as an adult that she has several half-siblings whom she has to build bonds with as an adult, and to investigate what the concept of family truly means. Glinting out from behind every moment of tentative connection is the gross fact that her siblings come from her father’s inseminating women, without their consent, with his own genetic material to create his own descendants, a decision that’s neither endorsed nor decried by the series.
The three daughters with whom we spend time are Snow’s Julia Bechley, raised by a prominent fertility doctor whose exploits become known to her only partway through the pilot; Edie Palmer , a frenemy of Julia whose career as a lawyer enables her to defend the man who concealed his parentage of her for her entire life; and Roxy Doyle , a loose and lazy parody of an influencer. The mercurial and somewhat lost Roxy finds in Hutton’s Dr.
It’s not that a man who deceived women into having his biological children when they’d intended otherwise couldn’t, possibly, eventually have real relationships with said children. But the show takes as a given that these relationships would flourish basically instantly and without any real work of restoration for what Bechley had stolen . No one is beyond redemption, but the show’s approach to Bechley suggests it believes that no character on the show is beyond mindless approval.
In another art form, Bechley’s acts might be the jumping-off point for a serious investigation of culpability and consent; the character description of the fertility doctor acting as both physician and secret parent as often vulnerable and motivated by a misguided benevolence could be grist for, say, a very sharp independent film or, on TV, a show not beholden to advertisers and the mandate to draw a big, broad audience.
Hutton, an able actor asked to play an outright villain as a man with just-beneath-the-surface potential for heroism, is not up to the brief of vacillating without clear motivation, of trying to remain family-drama-likable even as his deeds urgently demand an address the show’s writers can’t find their way towards. In place of that, we get moments of attempted comedy about what it’s like to move in with a sister you never knew you had.
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