But when it came to her sitcom “The Neighbors,” which began on ABC in September, “they couldn’t actually criticize, because they’re Jewish parents, and that’s a hard thing for them to do,” she said. “But they definitely were flummoxed.”
They weren’t the only ones. The pilot for the comedy, whose season finale will run on Wednesday, was eviscerated by critics, often landing on worst-show lists. Tim Goodman of The Hollywood Reporter called it “one of the least funny things to air on television since the last Hitler documentary on History.”
Certainly the premise sounded like the derivative brainchild of a network executive: Marty and Debbie Weaver (Lenny Venito and Ms. Gertz) and their three children move from a cramped apartment in Bayonne, N.J., to a town house in an upper-middle-class suburban subdivision, where it turns out the neighbors are extraterrestrials: the Zabrovians, stranded on Earth after a mission a decade earlier. By the way, the aliens all dress in golf wear, speak in stilted language and name themselves after famous American athletes.
The vision for the series, though, came from the executive producer Dan Fogelman, who got the idea while watching people putter around his mother’s condominium community in Manalapan, N.J. He wrote the pilot aiming for a family show that just happened to have extraterrestrials in it. Despite the extensive history of aliens on TV, from “My Favorite Martian” to “Third Rock From the Sun,” Mr. Fogelman, whose credits include the film “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” took a screenwriter’s perspective in defense of his series, saying that “the truth is there’s been five or six shows in 50 years of television that had an alien component, but every year in film there’s 20 films” that feature aliens.
“We just did what we thought was funny and was entertaining,” he continued, adding that it was tough to insert what he considered the show’s heart in an exposition-heavy pilot. “What we have to do is tell a story of this human family that’s moving into a new house and discovering that everybody in the community is aliens and then also learn why the aliens have come to Earth. It was a lot to do in 22 minutes.”
The bad reviews took everyone by surprise. “I started thinking, ‘Am I the crazy one?’ ” said Simon Templeman, who plays the Zabrovians’ leader, Larry Bird. “Then I give the scripts to my kids to read. I hear them both chuckling. One is 13, and one is 20. I thought, ‘No, I am not crazy.’ ”
Toks Olagundoye, who plays Larry Bird’s extraterrestrial wife, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, suggested that minds were made up before the pilot was even broadcast. “I think people thought: ‘Oh God, two families and one family is an alien family. This is going to be stupid.’ The second they put the word ‘stupid’ in their own head, they wrote off the possibility of it being an intelligent comedy, and it really is.”
Mr. Venito said the critics had shackled the show to aliens of television’s past. “I remember we got compared a lot to ‘Alf,’ which I still can’t understand,” he said. “So they felt like you’re trying to get by on some gimmick and make a lot of money. That’s not what it’s about.”
Despite the negative reviews “The Neighbors” has survived during a season in which many new comedies were either canceled or suffered ratings declines. The show’s viewership, around six million a week, isn’t spectacular and represents a 25 percent drop-off from “The Middle,” the sitcom leading into it, but the audience has held steady throughout most of the season. While there’s no indication that it will get renewed for a second season, its performance has been more consistent than most of ABC’s other new comedies. And some critics have revised their opinions.
“I thought there were some laughs” in the pilot, said Marc Berman, editor of TVMediaInsights.com, “but I found it to be more irritating than funny. I didn’t see where the show was going to go, I didn’t see a Season 2. It was a novelty that’s not going to work.” But the family stories and somewhat more tempered pace won him over. “They slowed the pace down, focused more on the characters and situation.”
As the season unfolded, Mr. Fogelman and his writers focused on the relationships between the Weavers and the Bird-Joyner-Kersees instead of alien gadgetry or reveals of their real gooey-green selves. A relationship between the Weavers’ daughter Amber (Clara Mamet) and the Zabrovian teenager Reggie Jackson (Tim Jo) has also developed. “What we’ve found that what audiences latch onto more is the human stuff,” Mr. Fogelman said, “the alien stuff with a human tilt.”
In February, sensing the turning tide of reviews, he worked with ABC on an unusual ad featuring excerpts from the initial negative notices, followed by blurbs from the subsequent positive ones, with the tagline “It’s O.K. to say you like it.”
Mr. Fogelman told the network: “Let’s just own it, and let’s start with everything people are seeing and let’s make that part of the story, because not only are we succeeding but we have had to overcome a fair amount of criticism to succeed.”
The network’s marketing department was interested in the opportunity to try something different. “Whenever someone jumps on the bandwagon of negativity, people are afraid to embrace their own opinions about things,” said Marla Provencio, the marketing chief for ABC’s entertainment division. The promotion’s message was, “If critics changed their minds on it, you can too.”
Either way the show’s stars and Mr. Fogelman view the low expectations for “The Neighbors” as a blessing in disguise. “I would rather start at a place where people are thinking it is not going to work and end up in a place where everyone has to apologize than start in a place where everyone thinks it is going to be fantastic and it fails,” Ms. Olagundoye said.
In the finale the science-fiction fan favorites George Takei and Mark Hamill will make guest appearances. Mr. Fogelman said the episode is a strong conclusion to a strong first season, no matter what the critics say. “I’ll never quite understand critical stuff,” he said. “I don’t understand it when it goes in my favor. I don’t understand it when it goes against.” Then again, he said, “I guess it’s not my job to.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/arts/television/the-neighbors-on-abc.html?partner=rss&emc=rss