What I’m Watching: Life in Pieces

Life in Pieces: Season 1, Episode 5 “Babe Secret Phone Germs” (C+)

This show is pretty fun, but it’s not great. Some of the plotlines, like John buying his granddaughter a phone, are decent life lessons, but they don’t make for excellent comedy or drama. That storyline featured a particularly jarring outburst from Dianne Wiest’s Joan which I imagine seemed a much more solid moment on paper that it came out in the scene. Sophia’s precociousness is amusing to a degree, but it’s also hard to take seriously. Jen and Greg fighting to not become germaphobic parents is an understandable and relatable cause, and naturally they would have to get plagued by two very excessive manifestations of cleanliness to fight them at every turn, like a skunk who sneaks into the house and a handyman whose shoeless socks leave footprints and who is bold enough to pick a pacifier up off the floor and stick it right back into a baby’s mouth. Ken Marino was the perfect person to play the hapless Will, Matt and Colleen’s coworker who just happened to walk in on them making out and realize that they were in a relationship. Matt quitting was incredibly dramatic, but it’s nice to see that the screwup child is doing well in one aspect of his life, having found a great girl who appears to have gotten over his previous marriage and even managed to win over his family with her multilingual abilities at brunch. Tyler’s new girlfriend being so much older and, for lack of a better word, larger, was excessive, but it was decently fun to see Heather stumble and make a toast to boobs.