Melissa Joan Hart and Joey Lawrence, two important figureheads of the teenybopped '90s, have united to give us Melissa & Joey, an ABC Family series that looks like a "TGIF" effort from exactly 1997. Let's review last night's pilot episode, size up both actors' sitcom skills, and declare one of these two Tiger Beat phenoms this week's victor.
Melissa & Joey's concept goes like this: Melissa Joan Hart is a fixture in local government who's so busy that she can hardly give enough TLC to her niece and nephew, two adolescent children she took in after their real parents abandoned them. Joey Lawrence, who once ambushed Hart at a town hall meeting about "garbage pick-ups," drops by to apologize for his brusqueness, but after he establishes that he's losing his job, wife, house, and car, he realizes that he can relate to Hart's troublemaking children and help them in a way she can't. He's hired as a male nanny. It's Who's the Boss? meets Charles in Charge, but with '90s Caroline-Rhean flair! Step by Step follows at 9, with Hangin' with Mr. Cooper at 9:30. Then it's off to bed for you, tiny viewer.
Say what you will about Hart's sitcom oeuvre (which ranges from Clarissa Explains It All to Sabrina the Teenage Witch and covers... actually, nothing in between), but she's a confident kitsch-pusher. Her harried dialogue can be trite trite, and I don't believe her backstory -- her HR assistant says to her at some point, "You remind me of your father, the esteemed senator" -- but I like her, dammit. Hart isn't half-stepping the hard sell of a throwback family series, and she's taking pratfalls and swanning about a classic couch-stairwell-fireplace set to prove it. If she still had a magical cat named Salem on hand, it would deadpan that Hart is taking this "more seriously than a triple hairball." That might even be a real line.
Lawrence, on the other hand, is so clearly playing a "Joey Lawrence character" that I want an archivist to check to make sure he hasn't recited this dialogue before, line for line. As the tight-sweatered manny who marries gauche entrances with casual paternal instinct, he's a predictable foil for Melissa in the Tony Danza mold. At least Lawrence adds enough "Whoa" in terms of sheer commitment. His solemn speeches to Melissa's niece Lennox? His self-deprecating jokes about baldness? This workhorse was made for the Melissa Joan Hart school of ABC Family relevance.
But a victor must be declared, and the winner of the pilot episode's war of sitcom veterans is Hart. She's dishing Clarissa Darling's cynical asides, Sabrina Spellman's multicam magnetism, and just a hint of her Dancing with the Stars grandiosity. Comparatively, Lawrence is giving us a nondescript slice of his old roles with too obvious a nod to Danza. If this manny is going to steal the show by cleaning up a frazzled household, he'll have to get a little dirtier first.