I’m still hanging in there with No Ordinary Family, and so is ABC. They announced that the show, which still remains in an unfortunate time slot against Glee, has been reviewed for entire season of 22 episodes. That is quite a vote of confidence for this freshman series that hasn’t generated the greatest deal of buzz.
No Ordinary Family has surpassed my expectations—but I remain a tad concerned that the series can run into a repetitive glut. That remains to be seen though. It’s good to see that the show hasn’t gone the route of supervillain-of-the-week.
I think the most unexpected pleasure of the show has been its two MVP’s: Romany Malco and Autumn Reeser.
Malco (The 40 Year Old Virgin) plays Jim Powell’s best friend and confidant George St. Cloud. Malco knows how to play over the top without becoming totally obnoxious. His strength is also the subtlety of his facial expressions; they express everything the viewer needs to understand about his character.
In “No Ordinary Ring” Powell daughter Daphne is frustrated that she is without a sounding board of her own. Jim brings George home for Daphne to do some gut spilling. George tells her to spill away, but his expression conveys anything but comfort as he thinks “Anything but that puberty stuff. Just pass right over that please.”
In the same scene Reeser, who plays Stephanie Powell lab assistant Katie, looks equally uncomfortable as she wonders if the Powell’s will be serving dinner. Reeser has the complex task of playing a ditz with brains and her scenes are consistently memorable. In tonight’s episode (“No Ordinary Quake”) she goes from competently explaining how she’s breaking into an encrypted file to spastically sharing her knowledge of super hero conventions.
Malco and Reeser are keeping No Ordinary Family from being anything but ordinary.
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