The pilot of the CW’s new Canadian import “18 to Life” plays like an improv exercise in a high-school drama class: “You’re an 18-year-old girl in the park. You must get your boyfriend to propose to you, accept and then tell both sets of parents that you’re going to get married. OK, go.”
And so Jessie (Stacey Farber, “Degrassi: The Next Generation”) truth- or-dares her next-door-neighbor boyfriend, Tom (“Life With Derek’s” Tom Seater), into proposing and soon they are confronting his parents (controlling, uptight, non-practicing Jews) and hers (unmarried hippie activists with an Iraqi refugee living in their basement) who are no more or less believable than the show’s premise.
Not surprisingly, none of the parents is thrilled with the prospect of the previously bound-for-college children getting married. And so they enter into a Lucy-and-Ethel reverse-psychology scheme, which backfires, of course, and mere days after the park episode, Tom and Jessie are husband and wife.
If you don’t turn the show off in the first 15 minutes, and you very well might because it is that clunkily acted and poorly written, things get a tiny bit better. Well, things don’t — the two do get married and don’t seem to understand what the fuss is about (making it alarming that they even got accepted into college) — but the characters are allowed to relax slightly and the possibility of an old-fashioned coming-of-age comedy, in which a young couple is bullied and supported by two very different types of families, peeks its head around the cardboard setup.
As Jessie’s parents, Al Goulem and Angela Asher (who may have the best voice in the biz since Kathleen Turner) are politically picayune but parentally slack activists who regard weddings as festivals of greed and marriage as an unnecessary government intervention. Tom’s parents (played by Ellen David and Peter Keleghan) are much more tightly wound, believing that indeed good fences make good neighbors. That, of course, must change, as the two families become related, first in opposition to and then in baffled acceptance of their kids’ marriage.
It’s a pretty retro story line for the CW and raises some interesting questions about marriage. It is much more shocking to see these young people leap into matrimony than it would be if they were just having sex or even moving in together.
Still, imperfect parents having to confront their own limitations through their children’s rocky rise to adulthood is the oldest sitcom plot in the box, so there’s something refreshing about the troublesome adolescent behavior being marriage.
