In sitcoms, hostility trumps all

Both “Free Ride” and “Sons & Daughters,” two midseason sitcoms arriving this week and next on Fox and ABC, respectively, happen in a whir of clever intentions and clipped editing. They’re recognizably spawns of “Arrested Development” -- openly hostile family shows in which the kids are world-weary, the grown-ups act like kids and the camera ping-pongs from face to face.

My kingdom for a two-shot. Sitcoms now move like reality shows, reality shows like sitcoms; the two genres -- one only getting more scripted and the other, apparently, less -- have some sort of star-crossed lovers thing going.

What both want, of course, are comedy and the illusion of something real, nowadays represented by the spoofy, documentary feel of the since-canceled “Arrested” but also NBC’s “The Office,” HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” or Comedy Central’s “Reno 911.”

“Free Ride,” debuting tonight on Fox after “American Idol,” has a reality show and/or sitcom premise -- empty nesters are invaded by an unwanted stranger, who happens to be their son returning from college. They allow that he can stay in the garage, but can Nate deal with Wednesday, which for Mom and Dad is “sex night”?

The creator of “Free Ride,” Rob Roy Thomas, previously produced “Significant Others,” a short-lived series on Bravo about married couples in therapy. The show, whose 12 total episodes were recently made available on DVD, is a hoot -- as much for its familiarity of themes as its outrageousness and loose play with the sitcom form.

The sense of semi-improvised play is evident in “Free Ride,” but not so much the human connection. Thomas has cranked this one up; “Free Ride” is seemingly made with the same over-worked camera from the stricken “Arrested” set, and with the same misanthropy that turns its back on “Friends” as a false sitcom god.

Nate (Josh Dean) moves back in with his boomer parents in Johnson City, Mo., after a less-than-rigorous college career at UC Santa Barbara. He’s as directionless as Zach Braff in “Garden State” only without the lithium and the depressive staring off into space. He’s also planning to stay a while -- five months, which happens to be when hometown girl Amber (Erin Cahill) will marry her fiance, unless Nate, smitten, can stop her.

For Fox, you feel Thomas added the character of Dove (Dave Sheridan), who drives a monster truck and appears to have been raised less by people than by Chris Farley movies. The comedy of “Free Ride” comes from the manifestations of Nate’s post-grad, Generation Y aimlessness in the exurbs (he takes a job as a waiter in a theme restaurant called Kangaroo Jack’s, where he is forced to recite the “marsupial of the day”), and from the tried-and-true formula of you can’t go home again.

As in “Significant Others,” Nate’s parents (Loretta Fox and Allan Havey) are in couples’ counseling, their marriage a kind of improv -- here’s the situation, here’s the emotion, go. “Free Ride” is a bit more than passably good, but like “Arrested” it feels hard to love, its rules of engagement fixed: Outrageousness will ensue around Nate, and Nate, in the middle of it, will wear for us a perplexed look.

Fred Goss wears this same expression, a lot of the time, on “Sons & Daughters,” although there are shades to it; he’s a very funny actor to watch. Goss plays Cameron, the putative head of an extended family of wives, step-parents, kids, sisters, single moms, all living in close proximity in a Cincinnati suburb.

It’s morning once again for the American sitcom, and families are repositories of biological determinism, shameful hang-ups and iffy choices, but without the laugh track and shot documentary style.

“Sons & Daughters,” created by Goss and Nick Holly, is meant to conjure a terribly unkempt nucleus, to do for the family sitcom what “Arrested” did, only without the zany, breathless pop cultural referencing. But the show, similarly, is fluid and aspires to a higher class of punch line: Cameron in the pilot alone references Ken Kesey, Nuremberg and Lizzie Borden.

For all the billboards and promotion ABC gave Heather Graham in the one-and-done “Emily’s Reasons Why Not,” “Sons & Daughters” falls into the category of a network airing quality, despite itself.

There are some lines that stand up without context, such as “Do you think it’s weird to master the harmonica and not tell anybody?” and, “I’m pretty in Cincinnati, I’m not pretty in a general sense.”

This line is spoken by Cameron’s sister Sharon (the wonderful Alison Quinn), who’s in a sexless marriage with husband Don (Jerry Lambert), the secret harmonica player (metaphor alert). “Sons & Daughters” has the tone of something that’s going to show you whatever shames and depravities are lurking beneath the surface of domesticity; in this way it reminded me a bit of “Happiness,” Todd Solondz’s 1998 movie parting the curtain on middle-class dysfunction.

There the depravities burrowed much deeper, extending to child molestation. Here it’s more harmonicas and bad community theater.

“Sons & Daughters” is executive produced by “Saturday Night Live” founder and comedy mafia don Lorne Michaels. It’s very well-acted and meanwhile, when it can stand it, kind of tender, although it’s far more interested in “Curb”-like moments of uncomfortable confrontation. In the pilot, Cameron’s stepfather (Max Gail of “Barney Miller”) announces that he’s leaving Cameron’s mother (Dee Wallace), the news of which spreads like wildfire as Cameron corrals everybody for his parents’ 25th wedding anniversary.

I didn’t need to have the Hitler mustache painted on the sleeping great aunt’s face at the party, but the fact that you can already identify a joke too hacky for the show is a good sign. Like a kissing cousin of “Arrested” (which apparently sits in limbo between its cancellation and resurrection on Showtime), “Sons & Daughters” has just enough deadpan hostility to keep everyone together.

*

‘Free Ride’

Where: Fox

When: 9:30 tonight. Moves to 9:30 p.m. Sundays beginning March 12.

Ratings: TV-PG-DS (may be unsuitable for young children, with advisories for suggestive dialogue and sex)

*

‘Sons & Daughters’

Where: ABC

When: 9 p.m. Tuesday

Ratings: TV-PG-DL (may be unsuitable for young children, with advisories for coarse language and suggestive dialogue)