When ABC unveiled its fall lineup during meetings with advertisers last spring, you didn’t need superhero eardrums to hear the groans prompted by No Ordinary Family.
A family survives a plane crash in the Amazon and returns with super powers? Why not just call it The Bionic Couple? And don’t forget the platform shoes and a cutting-edge KC and the Sunshine Band soundtrack.
Even when the show starts, the Powells are no ordinary family but a dissociative collection of damaged individuals headed for a total crack-up. Frustrated Jim (Michael Chiklis, The Shield), whose dreams of painting wilted into work as a police sketch artist, feels detached from his marriage to corporate careerist Stephanie (Julie Benz, Dexter).
Daughter Daphne (Kay Panabaker, Summerland) is a study in teenage alienation who doesn’t see why she even has to join a family vacation: “I just don’t see why you guys can’t go without me and Photoshop me in later.” Her younger brother JJ (Jimmy Bennett) is lost in the wilderness of a learning disability.
Jim insists on the vacation in a last-ditch attempt to reunite his family, but it’s more fractured than ever after surviving the plane crash. And as they learn that their immersion in the waters of a remote stretch of the Amazon River has left them with such abilities as catching bullets and reading minds, the Powells are pulled even farther apart by their fear of being found out and branded as freaks.
“I think I liked us better when we were just dysfunctional,” bitter Daphne complains.
The unexpectedly jagged edges of No Ordinary Family are only sharpened by an excellent cast. Chiklis and Benz are splendid as a startled couple whose marriage is force fed excitement after years of entropy.
And Panabaker is a riot as their sulky, contemptuous daughter, so wedded to her cellphone that when their plane corkscrews toward the Amazon, she tries to text God. ROFLMAO, dude.
