April 2, 2005
Joanne Weintraub
Oy, Fran. For this you came back to sitcoms?
"Living With Fran" does a gender-bender on the old joke about the divorced man who moves in with a girl half his age. This time, the middle-aged parent of two smitten with the young hottie is Fran Reeves (Fran Drescher, "The Nanny"), whose live-in boyfriend, Riley Martin (Ryan McPartlin, "Passions"), is just a few years older than her ex-med-student son, Josh (Ben Feldman).
In the pilot, the first of two episodes that will premiere Friday, 21-year-old Josh - freshly expelled from medical school after having a meltdown and threatening a colleague with a bone saw - comes home to find his old bedroom full of Riley's gym equipment and his mother's bedroom full of Riley.
Josh disapproves. Fran tells him to mind his own business.
Mother to son, proudly: "I'll have you know that I am at my sexual peak!"
Boyfriend to no one in particular, warmly: "I'll say!"
Thanks for sharing, folks.
The Reeves ménage also includes 15-year-old Allison (Misti Traya, "Huff"), a master of sarcasm who calls her brother "(butt)-clown" and fears "losing my job at IHOP for not sleeping with the waffle foreman." She's all for Riley, mostly because Josh is against him.
In "The Nanny," Drescher played a cartoon of a Jewish yenta - always kvetching, schlepping or noshing - but it was a pretty funny cartoon. Here, she's more like a stick figure with a balloon coming out of her mouth saying: "I'm still hot stuff! Wanna see me twitch my tush?"
The second episode, which features Marilu Henner ("Taxi") and John Schneider ("Smallville") as Riley's parents, has some less frantic, more human moments than the first. But Drescher's style, always broad, has become so exaggerated that, when she's surprised, she puts her hands to her face like the 10-year-old Macaulay Culkin in "Home Alone."
A 47-year-old cancer survivor, Drescher looks, as both Fran Reeves and Nanny Fran Fine would say, faaaabulous. And she was very good last year as a terminal cancer patient in Lifetime's "Strong Medicine."
So maybe she should try more drama instead of this "Living With Fran" business? Listen, it couldn't hurt.
E-mail Joanne Weintraub at jweintraub@journalsentinel.com.