Malco and Reeser: The MVP's of 'No Ordinary Family'

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.

No Ordinary Family: A Few Thoughts

I’ve watched the first three episodes of ABC’s freshman series No Ordinary Family and have enjoyed what I’ve seen to this point. For the uninitiated, the series follows the Powells as they each begin to deal with abilities gained from their plane crashing into a lake full of super powery gunk (hey, I’m no scientist). Dad Jim (Michael Chiklis) has super strength; mom Stephanie (Julie Benz) is really fast; daughter Daphne (Kay Panabaker) can read minds; and son JJ (Jimmy Bennett) has super intelligence.

Everything is moving in the right direction so far. The family has been dealing with learning about their powers and what it all means. However, No Ordinary Family has the capacity to grow repetitive in a way that only Glee is immune to. The creators and stars have claimed that the show is more about the family aspect of the series and less about super powers and derring do.

The show may back the stories and its character into a corner though. Like Heroes, the show has a main villain in Dr. Dayton King (Stephen Collins) who employs bad guys with powers. I’m not a television writer, but at some point the focus can’t be about the trials and tribulations of the Powell family if there are nasty guys with nastier powers who are trying to track them down.

In Heroes I found it far-fetched that the Claire character (the cheerleader) continued to attend high school and live at home even though she and her family were attacked endlessly there. A status quo change was needed regularly because, like it or not, there’s no way the family is going to stay put if their lives are in constant peril. If the Powell’s are eventually “unmasked” they will be in a similar predicament.

I’d also like to see the writers do interesting things with the powers of the kids. JJ has become super intelligent and has a voracious appetite for learning. It would seem that by the end of the season he would have a drastically different personality as he begins to learn and struggle with information, concepts, and philosophical questions of which he previously could not conceive. Daphne’s mental powers should progress a little more because reading minds is kind of a boring power. As her abilities manifest she could start influencing people, rejiggering memories, or out and out controlling minds.

Last piece of advice: no time travel. I don’t actually think they’d go there, but I thought it was important to take another swipe at Heroes.