Modern Men aired from March until April 2006 on The WB.
Tim, Kyle and Doug (Josh Braaten, Max Greenfield, Eric Lively), were lifelong friends who were all having relationship problems. Insecure Tim was too earnest for his own good and was constantly getting dumped. Kyle was a womanizer incapable of making a committment and Doug was still trying to start over after his divorce from his high school sweetheart, the only girl he had dated since he was 15. Their solution was to hire Dr. Victoria Stangel ( Jane Seymour), a professional " life coach," to give them advice and guidance on what to look for in women and not screw up the relationships after they had found them.
Tim's self-assured , independent younger sister Molly ( Marla Sokoloff), who had suggested the guys go to Dr. Stangel, was in law school and hoped the guys, especially her brother, would find meaningful relationships with Dr. Stangel's help. This was in stark contrast to their father, Tug ( George Wendt), a retired pro-football player who owned a local restaurant, The Tughouse, with Tim. Tug was an old-fashioned male chauvinist pig.
A Review from Variety
Modern Men
(Series; WB, Fri. March 17, 9:30 p.m.)
By BRIAN LOWRY
Filmed in Los Angeles by Jerry Bruckheimer Television in association with Warner Bros. Television. Executive producers, Marsh McCall, Jonathan Littman, Bruckheimer; co-executive producers, Ross McCall, Aaron Peters; producer, Faye Oshima; director, James Widdoes; writers, Ross McCall, Peters, Marsh McCall.
Tim Clarke - Josh Braaten
Kyle Brewster - Max Greenfield
Doug Reynolds - Eric Lively
Molly Clarke - Marla Sokoloff
Dr. Victoria Stangel - Jane Seymour
Tug Clarke - George Wendt
Not to speak ill of the half-dead, but "Modern Men" is a prime example of why the WB has struggled to establish an identity in comedy. A nondescript sitcom that's little more than a three-man version of NBC's "Four Kings," there's nothing here bearing even a glancing resemblance to the net's better dramas -- beginning with the premise, in which the show's twentysomething guys spend every waking moment trying to get laid. The twist, such as it is, involves the trio retaining Jane Seymour as their "life coach." Some remedial instruction in sitcom construction might have helped, too.
When we meet these unlikely best buddies, Tim (Josh Braaten) is being dumped by his girlfriend; Doug (Eric Lively) is still pining for his ex-wife; and Kyle (Max Greenfield) is waltzing through a series of one-night stands. It's Tim, the triumvirate's one semi-relatable character, who gloms onto the life-coach idea after a nudge from his sister (a too-little-used Marla Sokoloff of "The Practice"), concluding, "Unless we want to be old and alone, we need to evolve."
There's ample room for life guide Victoria (Seymour) to impart snippets of advice -- like being honest with women -- that immediately yield significant dividends to the manly knuckle-draggers. That's because the women are little more than oversexed sitcom props -- which is odd, really, considering the female skew of the WB audience.
Representing a first foray into half-hour comedy by Jerry Bruckheimer, "Modern Men" actually leaves you hoping the producer will revert to bigscreen form and blow something up.
Braaten possesses a certain easygoing charm, but his buddies are too-familiar cartoons, and the vast majority of setup/joke combinations are painfully obvious. Even Seymour and George Wendt, as Tim's dad, can't ground the show in any semblance of reality.
Moreover, the guys literally spend every moment entangled with women, whether it's testing Victoria's schemes or analyzing the strategies afterward. Don't they ever catch a ballgame together or something?
It's up to Kyle, the ladies' man, to drive home the underlying message with characteristic subtlety. "I've dug my own grave -- with my penis," he says in the second episode.
Well, sure, who hasn't? But that doesn't mean anybody should feel obligated to watch.
A Review from The New Yok Times
TV Weekend | 'Modern Men'
Sensitive New Age Guys in Training
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: March 17, 2006
FOR young women today, Chicago seems to be the new Alaska — a remote, primitive place where single men are plentiful and still relatively unspoiled.
"Modern Men," which has its premiere tonight on WB, is yet another new sitcom to be set in the Second City — "The Loop," on Fox, is also about 20-somethings searching for love in Chicago, and so is "Freddie," on ABC. (Jason Bateman starred in a short-lived 1997 sitcom about three uncouth single men called "Chicago Sons," a series perhaps a few years ahead of its time.)
This one, however, is tailored to WB's core audience of women ages 12 to 24 and purports to offer the male perspective on romance. Actually, it caters to the Elle Girl fantasy that young men have feelings, and with proper tutoring can be trained to explore and express them. It's sweet, if naïve: when they are a little older, these viewers will learn that in his 20's, the only feeling a man wants to feel is a feel.
The three childhood friends of "Modern Men" have problems with women and together turn to Dr. Victoria Stangel (Jane Seymour), a sexy and supremely self-confident life coach. Doug (Eric Lively) cannot get over his divorce from his high school sweetheart, the only woman he has ever dated. Tim (Josh Braaten) cannot sustain a meaningful relationship, while Kyle (Max Greenfield) doesn't even try — he is a cut-rate Casanova whose promiscuity masks self-doubt. All three fear they will turn 30 without having found true love. ("Unless we want to be old and alone," Tim says, "we have to evolve.")
Tim's sister Molly (Marla Sokoloff), an assertive law student, explains that because women no longer need men, even to have babies, he and others of his sex "have to make us want you." He agrees to see the life coach she recommends and recruits his buddies for treatment á trois. They are mocked and discouraged by Tim's father, Tug, a former football player who owns a bar called the Tughouse, and is portrayed by George Wendt (Norm on "Cheers"). Tim is his business partner, and was taught by his father to be a macho, pre-feminism man. (Tug says it is "cute" that Molly is allowed to "pretend" to be a lawyer in moot court.)
The sitcom's setting is crucial: Chicago is more than a city on television, it is a metaphor. Dramas about doctors or police officers use the city to evoke gritty, rundown urban humanity: the setting of "Hill Street Blues" was left unnamed, but the police cars and many exterior shots, including the station house, said Chicago. Later there was "Chicago Hope" and "ER."
On sitcoms, Chicago has a different use: in the button-down days of Bob Newhart, the city was an avatar of normalcy — Midwestern common sense viewing the nutty, hedonistic excesses of either coast with wry bemusement. Now, Chicago is becoming the even playing field of television romance.
Only here is it possible to imagine young men so sheltered from the neuroses and narcissism of New York and Los Angeles that they actually are willing and able to change. Only in Chicago do men still take their cues from Mike Ditka, not "Nip/Tuck." And only on "Modern Men" could three friends inhabit a primordial, pre-metrosexual universe in which men hang out in bars and ballparks and are genuinely baffled by the opposite sex.
As the vampy but sharp-tongued Dr. Stangel, Ms. Seymour is less like Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, than a Jaguar-driving Mary Poppins, putting her uncouth clients in their place with such phrases as "Tim, do stop talking" and "God knows you need me." She abhors psychiatric dillydallying and has no interest in her clients' painful childhoods. (She tells them hers was "all ponies and picnics.") Instead, she tells them what to do; she is Dr. Phil in a camisole. There is some resistance. When Dr. Stangel asks them whether they have ever told a woman "the complete, honest, emotional truth," Tim responds, "Well, of course not." And Kyle is even more appalled. "We want to get chicks," he says. "Not be them."
"Modern Men" is funny, but it is actually all about role reversal, depicting an imaginary world in which young men are as deeply concerned about their love lives and future spouses as women are.
In the old westerns, gunslingers and cattlemen could be tamed by the love of a good woman, almost always a prim schoolteacher from the East. (Or as in Ms. Seymour's previous incarnation, a doctor.)
Television has moved on to the midwestern, a mythical place where women can still find plenty of raw but eligible men.
Modern Men
WB, tonight at 9:30, Eastern and Pacific times; 8:30, Central time.
Jerry Bruckheimer, Jonathan Littman and Marsh McCall, executive producers; Ross McCall and Aaron Peters, co-executive producers. From Jerry Bruckheimer Television in association with Warner Brothers Television Production.
WITH: Josh Braaten (Tim Clarke), Max Greenfield (Kyle Brewster), Eric Lively (Doug Reynolds), Jane Seymour (Dr. Victoria Stangel), Marla Sokoloff (Molly Clarke) and George Wendt (Tug Clarke).
A Review from USA TODAY
Neanderthals could out-joke 'Modern Men'
By Robert Bianco, USA TODAY
"Going out of business" sales are always a risk. Sure, there's a chance you'll find some hidden gem everyone else overlooked. But you're just as likely to get a badly made knockoff no one else was willing to buy.
Something like, say, Modern Men, which the soon-to-be-departed WB is inflicting upon us as an unwanted parting gift. Granted, should the show's premiere draw 100 million viewers, then you will, indeed, be seeing it again in September when WB and UPN converge into CW. In the real world, however, this is yet another terrible WB sitcom that never should have been made.
Co-created by Ross McCall and Aaron Peters, whose previous work includes The Tom Green Show, Kid Notorious and My Big Fat Greek Life, Modern Men is the stem-to-stern disaster that those credits would lead you to expect. This would-be comedy doesn't just defeat the talented and untalented members of the cast alike — it also makes it impossible to tell the difference.
As in Four Kings, the central characters are childhood friends whose continued adult friendship makes no sense, played by actors who have no chemistry. The supposed link is that all are relationship-challenged: wimpish Tim (Josh Braaten) is too passive; playboy Kyle (Max Greenfield) is too aggressive; and divorcée Doug (Eric Lively) is too odd.
So they do what any modern men would do: They trot off together to visit a life coach, played by Dr. Quinn's Jane Seymour, who seems to be at a total loss. The show also features Cheers star George Wendt, a bit of slumming that makes you think both veterans need to better weigh their career choices.
You would think just by the law of averages that Men would stumble upon a funny moment or a believable incident — but remarkably enough, it never happens. Unless you think there is someone on earth who would actually say, "What is she, a turnip," as a rejoinder — and someone else who would find it amusing.
Still, the most amazing part of Men is that it comes from the Jerry Bruckheimer TV factory that gave us CSI, Without a Trace and The Amazing Race. To be fair, Men is the company's first sitcom, and a stumble is to be expected. But you do expect Bruckheimer's folks to be able to read a script and realize it's terrible, look at actors and realize they're miscast, and see a show and realize it's not up to the company's standards.
WB may be going out of business, but Bruckheimer certainly isn't. We expect better from going concerns.
A Review from The Washington Post
TV Preview
The WB's 'Modern Men': Only One Thing on Its Mind
By Chip Crews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 17, 2006;
What's the only thing guys in their late twenties ever think about?
If your answer involved money, cars or liquor, then dude, you are so in the wrong solar system. The correct response is Sex, and anyone who doubts that should tune in to the premiere of WB's "Modern Men," tonight at 9:30 on Channel 50.
In the world of this show, sex is the only thing guys think about because it's the only thing there is. The three attractive leads are Tim (Josh Braaten), Kyle (Max Greenfield) and Doug (Eric Lively), and we know they have jobs because each job is mentioned a single time on tonight's show. (This is called careful writing.) And Tim, a bar and restaurant co-owner, must be thriving because his apartment is spacious, snazzy and expensive-looking.
And yet somehow so empty.
When we meet the three, they're in a bad way. Or, rather, in three different bad ways. Kyle, a handsome lady-killer, has just been caught sneaking away from a one-night stand. Doug, a divorced dim bulb, is engaged in humiliating efforts to win back his wife two years after their split. And Tim -- well, he just keeps getting dumped.
On the advice of his sister, Tim pays a visit to life coach Victoria Stangel (Jane Seymour), and soon enough the three friends are sharing a weekly appointment with her, trying to get their romantic acts together. ("So if you want to make this a group session, I can handle it," she tells them. "God knows you need me.") Stangel is clearly functioning as a psychologist; presumably she's a life coach in the script because a mental health professional might be less likely to offer a three-fer.
Stangel is withering and starchy, although much of her advice is pretty commonsensical. At the end of the first session, she admonishes them: "The next time you're with a woman, tell her the truth."
Kyle responds, "We want to get chicks, not be them." But in fact, each of them takes the advice, setting himself on a new but no less problematic romantic course.
A show like this -- the latest effort from the inescapable Jerry Bruckheimer -- doesn't ask a lot of its audience, or of itself. In that context, give the three leads credit: They display flashes of skill and even subtlety in depicting their one-dimensional characters. Through much of the show, Seymour -- a relative newcomer to comedy -- seems to be channeling Anne Robinson, the pinched, nasty-tempered host of "The Weakest Link," but the writers periodically remind us of her past by having her refer to her beauty and sex appeal.
There's nowhere to go with that in these circumstances. When, in a later episode, Kyle seems to be developing a thing for the life coach, it has the feel of a squeamish-making comedic dead end.
But all this series is looking for is a few snorts and sniggers from a young, hip audience. Whether that crowd will be home and tuned in to the WB on a Friday night, however, is a rather large question.
Modern Men (30 minutes) airs tonight at 9:30 on Channel 50.
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