Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)With its darkish humor, fine ensemble acting and atypical writing, this series deserves the chance to develop beyond a single season. For now, it's still a bit predictable and at times strains for a laugh, but it does manage to remain darkly funny over the course of each installment. The cast does a good job of portraying several familial archetypes -- especially Martin Freeman of "Tim" and "Arthur Dent" fame, again playing a worthy and charming loser who routinely finds himself on the wrong end of almost every situation.
To break out of the typical sitcom formula we also witness the myriad setbacks experienced by his more successful siblings. Setbacks they seem unable to recognize thanks to their ability to protect their egos with their professional accomplishments -- something Freeman's character has been stripped of. So what adds a little more shading here is the different ways in which these people respond to their own problems and the way they subsequently skew the view of their family members' problems. In short, no matter how strange their individual failings may be, anyone and everyone else is assumed to be even worse off.
There's a further twist as well -- albeit a somewhat gimmicky one. This pattern of failures and missed opportunities are given an inherited dimension by visiting a stream of odd and eccentric family failures down through the generations. At times these asides work well and play off the current storyline, and at other times they seem just stuck on to give the writers and audience alike a breather. When it works, it's funny. When it doesn't it offers a little twinge similar to the pain that some of those should-have-been-abandoned Python sketches pioneered.
While "The Robinsons" is yet some distance from reaching the polished and perfect pitch of "The Office", the present is above average television comedy, and the future potential remains high. Let's hope this loser wins in the end.
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The Robinsons are not related to any of the famous Robinsons: Edward G, Smokey or even Sugar Ray. No, they are a plain, run-of-the-mill family from Wimbledon, South London who have "done quite well". All of them, that is, except the youngest, Ed (Martin Freeman), (the black sheep of the family) who's 32, recently divorced after a disastrous marriage that lasted 5 ? months, doing a job that he hates and living in his aunt's flat in Bermondsey. What has gone wrong in his life? I mean, how difficult is it to find a girlfriend, a decent job, a good dry-cleaners and the meaning of life?
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