My Big Fat Greek Life - Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries

My Big Fat Greek Life aired from February until April 2003 on CBS.

When Nia ( Nia Vardalos) returned home to Chicago after her honeymoon to start married life, she found out that her well-meaning but meddlesome family was convinced that she still needed their advice and supervision. Her husband Thomas ( Steven Eckholdt), an English teacher working on his dissertation, found them a little hard to take but adapted as best he could. Nia's father, Gus ( Michael Constantine), owned a neighborhood restaurant, Dancing Zorba's, where Nia and most of her family worked. Incredibly patriotic to the land of his birth, Gus attributed everything good and/or important to the Greeks. Maria ( Lainie Kazan), her overprotective mother had a good heart but seemed to worry about everything and laid on guilt with a towel (" Nia, you're killing your father!"). Nia's marginally competent brother Nick ( Louis Mandylor), worked as a cook at the restaurant and, despite his leather-jacketed macho appearance was insecure and still living with his parents. Also seen were Nia's flamboyant Aunt Viola ( Andrea Martin) who had a solution for every problem, even those that didn't exist, and Niki ( Gia Carides), her obnoxious and insensitive daughter, who found fault with everything Nia did. Most of the action took place at Dancing Zorba's, although their were frequent flashbacks showing how Nia's upbringing had affected her as an adult.

My Big Fat Greek Life took up where the 2002 theatrical film My Big Fat Greek Wedding left off and with the exception of John Corbett, who had played Thomas in the movie, the entire cast reprised their roles in the tv series.

An Article from The New York Times

COVER STORY; Second Helpings at a Familiar Greek Feast

By ANITA GATES
Published: February 23, 2003

THEY'RE back. Gus Portokalos (Michael Constantine), a man who can turn any conversation into a discussion of Greek as the root of all language, a man convinced that no injury or ailment exists that cannot be healed by Windex. His wife, Maria (Lainie Kazan), a loving master manipulator. (''A man is the head'' of the family, she tells her daughter, ''but the woman is the neck, and she can turn the head any way she wants.'') Aunt Voula (Andrea Martin), who squeezes her young relatives' cheeks a little too forcefully and believes a neck tumor she once had was her unborn twin. And, of course, Toula Portokalos, our young Greek-American heroine, although her name has been changed to Nia, as in Nia Vardalos, the actress who plays her.

Yes, the extended Greek family of last year's surprise hit film ''My Big Fat Greek Wedding,'' written by Ms. Vardalos, has become a prime-time sitcom on CBS. After the show's premiere, tomorrow night at 9:30, it will settle into a regular 8 p.m. slot on Sundays.

The only major cast member who won't be back is John Corbett, Ms. Vardalos's love interest in the film. His character, Ian, was a preppy vegetarian dreamboat who was willing to do anything to win over her family, including being baptized into the Greek Orthodox Church in only his shorts in what looked like a plastic kiddie pool. Mr. Corbett, who has had good luck in series television before (with ''Northern Exposure'' and ''Sex and the City'' -- never mind ''The Visitor''), was committed to star in another new series, playing a compulsive gambler on FX's ''Lucky.''

Steven Eckholdt, who had regular roles on ''Providence'' and ''Melrose Place'' and appeared in the short-lived series ''It's Like, You Know,'' will be Nia's new husband, with a new character name, Thomas. Ms. Vardalos figured that Mr. Eckholdt, an old friend, could understand the character because his wife is half-Greek.

Mr. Corbett's boyish, laid-back charm will be missed, and Mr. Eckholdt does not want to make comparisons. ''John is John, and I'm me,'' he says. ''We're both male, which is a good thing.''

The movie -- the love story of a mousy, unmarried 30-year-old woman, her blossoming and the handsome man who loves her at first sight -- ended with an epilogue set six years after the wedding, when the couple's daughter is off to Greek school. The series, ''My Big Fat Greek Life,'' will fill in the gap, beginning with their return from their honeymoon.

The film is a Cinderella story, but it is also about an ugly duckling, and because the heroine has already been transformed into a beauty when the series starts, the show may have to switch gears. Where's the comedy in a couple of confident, attractive, loving newlyweds?

Rhoda Morgenstern comes to mind. On ''The Mary Tyler Moore Show,'' Rhoda (Valerie Harper) was Ms. Moore's lovable, overweight, self-deprecating best friend. When the spinoff ''Rhoda'' was created, its title character, who had lost weight, moved to New York and soon married a gorgeous guy. The character was never the same.

Brad Grey, an executive producer of ''My Big Fat Greek Life,'' doesn't see that sort of thing as a problem. He predicts that the character Nia will still be less than perfectly confident when she is around her family. ''We all behave very differently with our parents than we do with our friends,'' he says.

Ms. Vardalos, a co-writer of the series, is philosophical. ''I never discount any possibility,'' she says. ''I just operate from a place -- what makes me laugh?''

Ms. Vardalos, 40, was born in Winnipeg, Canada, and worked in musical theater and with the Second City comedy troupe before her big success. She did not find a huge demand for Greek actresses. ''I wrote the screenplay to get myself a job,'' she says.

That was a good move, as moviegoers know, and it won Ms. Vardalos an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay. The film, made for $5 million, opened in April in only a few theaters, but word of mouth was wildly favorable. ''People went out and told their 10 first cousins'' and so on, Ms. Vardalos theorizes.

The film was soon in 1,500 theaters nationwide and, as other April films (''Life or Something Like It,'' ''Jason X,'' Peter Bogdanovich's ''Cat's Meow'') faded away, it stayed. By Dec. 29, it had earned about $218 million at the box office in North American theaters.

Why?

''My theory is the country was in a very depressed time,'' says Rita Wilson, one of the film's producers. ''We had spent the winter mourning.'' And in early spring, seven months after Sept. 11, along came this movie, which, as Ms. Wilson points out, ''celebrated cultural diversity.'' A value not believed to be shared by Al Qaeda.

In a way it all began with Ms. Wilson. One day in 1997 she was feeling guilty about seeing so much theater in New York and so little in Los Angeles, her hometown. ''So I came home, opened up the section'' -- the newspaper's theater listings -- ''and the title just made me laugh.''

Off she went to see Ms. Vardalos's one-woman stage version of ''My Big Fat Greek Wedding'' and immediately thought it would make a great movie. Ms. Wilson is half-Greek and says her own wedding -- to Tom Hanks, in 1988 -- ''was as Greek as you could get without it being in the church hall.'' (Somehow it is easy to imagine Mr. Hanks at the reception, grinning sheepishly and joining in the traditional dance.)

Meanwhile an associate of Mr. Grey had seen Ms. Vardalos doing the same show in Montreal and reported back. As Mr. Grey recalls, ''we made a development deal right away.'' He believed the idea could be a big commercial success in prime-time television, not even expecting to have a hit movie's coattails to ride.

''We find ourselves in a very unusual circumstance,'' he says. ''We have a cast that has a great chemistry together.'' But because of the movie's success, ''there's a brighter light on it, which in my opinion is good and bad.''

''Hopefully, we'll have some time to prove we can make it work,'' he adds.

As for Ms. Vardalos's own Greek wedding, that happened almost 10 years ago. Her husband is Ian Gomez, who plays Mike, the leading man's best friend, in the film and the series. Mr. Gomez's heritage is partly Jewish and partly Puerto Rican, but he had his Greek Orthodox baptism before the ceremony.

My Big Fat Greek Life
Monday at 9:30 p.m. on CBS

A Review from The New York Times

TELEVISION REVIEW; A Honeymoon, Then the In-Laws

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: February 26, 2003

When a network like CBS does not send out review tapes of its much anticipated new sitcom, ''My Big Fat Greek Life,'' that does not necessarily mean something is wrong. It is, however, a little like a doctor asking a patient to come in and discuss the test results in person -- it is impossible not to feel a pinch of dread.

There was nothing wrong with the first episode of the comedy based on the film ''My Big Fat Greek Wedding,'' but there was enough missing to concern those who loved the movie. So far, ''My Big Fat Greek Life'' has all the predictable jokes and canned laughter of an ordinary sitcom without enough of the dark insights or droll wit that made its predecessor the most successful independent film ever made.

Sitcoms based on movies do not have a strong track record. For every ''M*A*S*H'' there are dozens of one-season duds, from NBC's ''Ferris Bueller'' in 1990 to two attempts at ''Casablanca,'' one on ABC in 1955 and another on NBC in 1983.

Paradoxically, perhaps, one problem is that the movie version of ''Greek'' was essentially a sitcom set across a large screen: an affectionate but sharply drawn portrait of an overbearing Greek-American family. It offered all the simple pleasures of television entertainment as well as a Cinderella story with an un-Hollywood twist: the heroine was 30, genuinely unattractive and depressed. Even after falling in love with her preppy prince and shaping up, she looked and acted nothing like Julia Roberts or Jennifer Lopez.

Once the story is refitted for the small screen and Cinderella marries, it settles into the well-worn family comedy groove of in-law-crossed lovers, from ''Bewitched'' to ''Everybody Loves Raymond.'' (This is not an easy formula for success: NBC's poorly rated ''In-Laws,'' starring Dennis Farina, was canceled.) ''Greek Life,'' which picks up the story immediately after the honeymoon, is scheduled to run on Sunday nights, but its debut was shown on Monday to ride on the coattails of ''Everybody Loves Raymond.''

It is also helpful that all the original cast members resume their roles in the television show except the love interest, John Corbett, who was committed to his own show, ''Lucky,'' which starts in April on FX. He is replaced by Steven Eckholdt, a veteran sitcom actor. (The senile grandmother who mumbled curses about the Turks was left out of the debut episode. Nor were there any references to the healing power of Windex.)

Like the film, the best thing about this sitcom is its heroine, played by the actress and writer Nia Vardalos. Her one-woman comedy routine prompted Rita Wilson, an actress and producer who is married to Tom Hanks, to develop a movie for her. Ms. Wilson also pitched a sitcom version to CBS, which signed on before the film version became a hit. Ms. Vardalos is an original who looks nothing like most television and movie actresses. In ''Greek Life,'' however, she sounds like any of half a dozen sitcom characters, including the office assistant played by Sara Rue on ABC's ''Less Than Perfect,'' who rely on homogenized ditsy sarcasm.

There is room for improvement if the writers settle down. With silent eye rolls and agile double takes, Ms. Vardalos expresses some of the idiosyncratic brand of humor left out of the script. For the television show, she and the producers decided to sanitize the setting. ''We are hipping up the show a little bit,'' Ms. Vardalos told reporters last month. ''In the movie we have, like, an Old World feel, and in the TV show it's going to be a little more accessible to a modern-day, 2003 audience.''

''Accessible'' is a worrisome word. Too often it means the television equivalent of pasteurized Camembert: safe, but not particularly tasty. The patriarch, Gus Portokalos, played by Michael Constantine, drew his humor from the dank, claustrophobic world he ruled with dotty tyranny. In a more modern setting, the parents' hold on the young couple seems less plausible. And because the newlyweds look well into their 30's, the family's pressure for a baby does not appear altogether absurd.

The writers rely too much on viewers' familiarity with the film. When the father corrects his son-in-law's insistence that Stonehenge is older than the Parthenon, he merely shouts that ''the Greeks built Stonehenge,'' which is funny only if one recalls his labored efforts to connect all civilization, including the word kimono, to the age of Pericles.

Sitcoms are an endangered species, pushed aside by the popularity of cheaper, less risky reality shows. ''My Big, Fat Greek Life'' deserves a chance to get over opening-episode jitters and find its voice. As ''Everybody Loves Raymond'' proved, a good cast is crucial, but it is the writing that makes a tired formula seem fresh.

MY BIG FAT GREEK LIFE
CBS, Sunday nights at 8 Eastern and Pacific times; 7 Central time.

Brad Grey, Marsh McCall and Rita Wilson, executive producers; produced by Brad Grey Television, the Playtone Company and Marsh McCall Productions in association with Sony Pictures Television.

WITH: Nia Vardalos (Nia Portokalos), Lainie Kazan (Maria Portokalos), Steven Eckholdt (Thomas Miller), Louis Mandylor (Nick Portokalos), Gia Carides (Cousin Nikki), Andrea Martin (Aunt Voula), Michael Constantine (Gus Portokalos) and Victoria Adams (Little Nia).

A Review from Entertainment Weekly

My Big Fat Greek Life

C-By Bruce Fretts
John Corbett's run of good luck began with his role as dreamy DJ Chris Stevens on CBS' sleeper ''Northern Exposure.'' He later exuded the same laid-back aura -- and recurred for far too long -- as Aidan Shaw on ''Sex and the City.'' (Did anybody believe Sarah Jessica Parker's cosmopolitan Carrie would find true love with an outdoorsy carpenter?) Then Corbett stumbled into a little movie called ''My Big Fat Greek Wedding.''

After ''Greek Wedding'' became the highest-grossing romantic comedy in history, Corbett's luck appeared to have run out. Screenwriter-star Nia Vardalos and the rest of the film's ensemble signed on for a CBS sitcom spin-off, the surefire hit My Big Fat Greek Life, but John Corbett couldn't join them since he'd agreed to headline the obscure basic-cable dramedy ''Lucky.'' As it turns out, though, fortune may still be smiling on him. ''Greek Life'' is a big fat bummer, and FX is suddenly the hot network, thanks to its Emmy and Golden Globe victories for ''The Shield.''

Steven Eckholdt (''It's Like, You Know...''), who replaces Corbett as Vardalos' WASPy husband in ''Greek Life,'' aspires to a Corbettesque coiffure but falls short in this and other areas. While Corbett was typically relaxed, Eckholdt comes across as tentative -- the new kid in Greek class.

His performance isn't the only difference between the sitcom and the movie. The newlyweds have been renamed (Nia and Thomas instead of Toula and Ian) and they now live across the street from her family's diner instead of next door to her pushy parents (uncured hams Michael Constantine and Lainie Kazan). The latter change was probably made to keep ''Greek Life'' from seeming too similar -- and paling in comparison -- to ''Everybody Loves Raymond.''

Vardalos, who developed the series with ''Just Shoot Me'''s Marsh McCall, pops her eyes wide open on almost every punchline, but she really should expend more energy punching up the tired scripts. As her dumb but lovable brother, Nick, Louis Mandylor is playing a sitcom cliché (he might as well be named Joey Tribbianopoulos), and Gia Carides has been given little to do as cousin Nikki besides show off her voluminous cleavage. Only ''SCTV'' vet Andrea Martin, as Aunt Voula, elicits laughs by the sheer force of her heavily accented delivery.

You can hardly blame an actor like Eckholdt for phoning it in when he's given nonjokes like this: ''In my family, Sunday night is always dispute-resolution night: dinner, '60 Minutes,' followed by a respectful, healthy debate of family issues.'' At least his family doesn't stay tuned for ''My Big Fat Greek Life'' -- which makes them almost as lucky as John Corbett.

A Review From entertainyourbrain.com

My Big Fat Greek Life" Review

By Shawn McKenzie 02/26/2003

When I reviewed the very successful independent movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding (see my review), I had stated that I thought this story would make a great weekly series that I myself would watch. I swear I made this statement before CBS announced that they were developing a sitcom based on the movie. Now we have that sitcom, called “My Big Fat Greek Life,” and I’m wondering if I had something else in mind.

“My Big Fat Greek Life” sort of picks up where the movie left off. There are a few changes in cast and plot from the movie. Nia Vardalos stars as Nia Portokalos (instead of Toula, her name in the movie), the newlywed Greek woman with the huge, proudly Greek family. She has just upset her family by falling in love and marrying a non-Greek teacher, Thomas Miller (Steven Eckholdt, not John Corbett, the actor from the movie, who is committed to the FX TV series “Lucky;” the character’s name is also no longer Ian, his name from the movie.) Her family eventually learns to accept him and welcomes him into the family. Nia and Thomas return from their honeymoon (in Greece, of course) to begin their new big fat Greek life together. That life will include her family, on a scale that would give Debra on “Everybody Loves Raymond” nightmares. Her family includes Nia's father, Gus (Michael Constantine), a proud Greek man who owns the family Greek restaurant called Dancing Zorba's. Her mother, Maria (Lainie Kazan), is very overprotective of her family and a font of advice (which isn’t always necessarily wanted.) Her lazy, protective brother, Nick (Louis Mandylor), is a macho Greek man who works at the restaurant as a cook with her family. Her Aunt Voula (Andrea Martin), a woman, who along with her mother, is always full of advice. Her big-haired cousin Nikki (Gia Carides) seems to be the most fun person in this clan who enjoys just watching the sparks fly with her cousin’s new marriage. Angelo (Joey Fatone) is another one of Nia’s cousins, who along with Nick, is very protective, but also likes to throw out the occasional insult just to be funny.

In the first episode, Nia and Thomas come back from their honeymoon just hoping they can go back to their apartment and relax. That isn’t going to happen in the Portokalos family. Right after they get off the plane, her family takes them back to the restaurant for a welcome-back party. It is there in which they learn that Gus has bought the couple a house with new furniture to go along with it. If you have seen the movie, you know that this plot point is different than it was in the movie. In My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Gus tells the couple he has bought them a house (right next door to him) at the wedding reception. In the TV show, they find out about the house after the honeymoon, and unless my movie geography is off, I think it is in a different location as well. At the end of the pilot episode, Gus points the house out to Nia as being across the street from the restaurant…so is Gus’s house across the street from the restaurant too? Whatever…the point is that the TV show has a few continuity errors from the movie, but after the first episode, I don’t think anybody will care.

So how is the show compared to the movie? I had said in my review that I liked the movie a lot because I identified with the character of Ian. I had been dating a woman who was very close to her large family, so I saw myself in the character. I guess when I was picturing a TV show version of the movie, I was visualizing another hour-long CBS show that has already come and gone called “That’s Life.” Both the movie and this show were very similar. The show centered around Lydia DeLucca (played by Heather Paige Kent), a woman who had a large, proudly Italian family. The father, Frank (Paul Sorvino), owned an Italian restaurant, and her overprotective mother, Dolly (Ellen Burstyn), and brother, Paulie (Kevin Dillon), meddled in her affairs constantly. The difference was that Lydia was trying to become independent of her family not by marrying a non-Italian, but by refusing to marry the Italian man she was engaged to and taking college classes. The show lasted a season and a half, and was a great mix of comedy and drama.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding was not a drama in the slightest, so maybe the hour-long dramedy format might not work for the TV show, but couldn’t it have been a half-hour, non-laugh track show? I think the traditional sitcom formula set up for this show takes away the charm of the movie and adds too much cheese. The continuity errors, name changes, and replacement of Corbett don’t bother me (Eckholdt is a decent substitution), but the format makes the show seem like an extreme version of every other sitcom about a couple with nosy parents. There are some great moments, like the sexual advice that Maria and Voula try to impart upon the couple, but otherwise, I’m not seeing a lot of original material. I’m wondering how much Vardalos is involved in the show’s scripts, because I know that she can be a funny woman.

I am going to give “My Big Fat Greek Life” some more chances, since I loved the movie so much. I also have seen many TV shows start off not too well and gel into something great. I remember not being too impressed with “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” at first (which is another TV show based off a movie coincidentally), but which is now my favorite show still on the air (at least until May, when it signs off after seven great seasons.) I hope that this show can gel into something great as well.

A Review from The Michigan Daily

'My Big Fat Greek' waste of a sitcom
By Adam Rottenberg, Daily Arts Writer on 3/7/03

This summer's blockbuster independent romantic comedy makes the leap from the big screen to the small screen in CBS' new series "My Big Fat Greek Life." Writer/actress Nia Vardalos transformed her one- woman show into a hysterical film that became the most successful independent film in history. Most of the main players return in the spin-off, but they left the humor in the theaters.

The show picks up when Nia (Vardalos), known as Toula in the film, and Thomas (Steven Eckholdt), replacing John Corbett's Ian, return from their honeymoon in Athens. In addition to the minor character changes, the final few minutes of the movie are disregarded as the honeymooners arrive to find that Nia's overbearing father has bought them a home. The plot of the pilot revolves around the decision of whether or not to accept the generous gift, and hilarity is supposed to ensue. Instead, the story deteriorates into a run of the mill sitcom, eliminating the tone and humor found in the feature film version.

The sincere comedy and familial bonds made the original film charming but, while most of the family returns to reprise their roles, the actors are now playing caricatures of the motion picture characters. Michael Constantine's Gus, Nia's father, simply acts in an overbearing manner throughout the entire episode, while his wife (Lainie Kazan) is always trying to feed her daughter.

Without three dimensional characters, the jokes become increasingly obvious and lose what little wit they might have had. The jokes and characters are so forced that it seems as if the actors are trying too hard to elicit laughter, especially Aunt Toula's (Andrea Martin) constant sexual references.

Unlike most unfunny and uninteresting new sitcoms, "Greek Life" does have some potential. The actors involved are extremely likable, especially following in the footsteps of such a beloved film. Surprisingly, Nia Vardalos seems to be the worst offender of forced acting. With more time, hopefully the sitcom will better mimic its successful precursor, but until then, the DVD version of the movie will have to suffice for viewers at home.

2 Stars

A Review from The Phoenix

A sit-com comes home
My Big Fat Greek Life brings the film to TV,

BY JOYCE MILLMAN

I’m no seer or anything, but I think I was the least surprised person in America at the success of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the little indie film that could. I married into a Greek family, and if there’s one thing I have learned about Greeks, it’s this: If you build it, and it has bouzouki music, they will come.

Nia Vardalos, the effervescent Canadian-born improv comedian who wrote My Big Fat Greek Wedding (first as a one-woman autobiographical stage show), knew this too. She persuaded the movie’s distributor to set up advance screenings for Greek church groups in large and medium-sized cities around the country, and word of mouth spread through this fiercely proud community. (My husband and I joke that the buzz went something like this: " Two thumbs up! The first must-see movie since Zorba! " )

Then a funny thing happened. Non-Greeks (or, as the father in the movie calls us, " everybody else who wishes they was Greek " ) went to see My Big Fat Greek Wedding and recognized their own families in Vardalos’s depiction of an emotional ethnic clan where the parents cling to the old ways and the younger generation yearns to be more " American. " The most ringing endorsement I have heard about the film came not from one of my Greek relatives but from an Indian colleague of my husband’s. When a Silicon Valley computer programmer from the subcontinent connects deeply to a movie about a Greek family from Chicago, you know you’ve got a phenomenon in the making. It’s no wonder that Greek Wedding went on to become the highest-grossing independent film (and romantic comedy) ever, having earned some $250 million so far just in the States.

But was it a good movie? Well, not really. Sure, the Greekisms were wincingly funny, from the flag of Greece painted on the Portokalos family’s garage door to the way the mother never takes no for an answer to her offer of food. ( " Are you hungry? " " I just ate. " " I’ll make you something. " ) And Vardalos’s character, Toula, sums up the second-generation Greek experience in one acutely observed speech that’s delivered as an apology to her white-bread fiancé, Ian (John Corbett): " I have 27 first cousins and my whole family is big and loud and everybody is in each other’s lives and businesses all the time and you never have a minute alone just to think because we’re always together, just eating, eating, eating. And all the people we know are Greek, because Greeks marry Greeks to breed more Greeks, to be loud, breeding, Greek eaters! "

But My Big Fat Greek Wedding is, as its core, a TV sit-com blown up to big-screen size. And it’s an underwritten sit-com at that. For most of the movie, Toula, the dutiful Greek daughter, is torn between her intrusive family’s displeasure at her engagement to an outsider and her desire to follow her heart. After the trials she and Ian endure leading up to the wedding (their families mingle about as well as souvlaki on Wonder Bread), you wonder how they can ever be together. There should be final test of commitment, on either Toula’s part or Ian’s, but there’s only a big fat storytelling hole in Vardalos’s screenplay. Instead, Toula’s wedding day comes and goes in a flash and it’s all very anticlimactic — especially if you’ve ever been to an actual Greek Orthodox wedding, which, I assure you, does not go by in a flash. Then again, if My Big Fat Greek Wedding offered a more authentic wedding, the movie would have been longer than Titanic.

In its transition from the screen to its tube version, My Big Fat Greek Life (8 p.m. Sundays, CBS), a not-so-funny thing happened: the sit-com movie became a real sit-com, and suddenly the movie looks like high art. It doesn’t seem possible that My Big Fat Greek Wedding could be simplified for TV, but it was. Toula is now called " Nia, " and Ian is now called " Thomas. " (Steven Eckholdt replaces Corbett in the sit-com.) I’m sure there were focus groups involved in the name change, but I can’t explain the reasoning behind it. The observations about Greek-American life that seemed sharp and revelatory in the movie are blunted through repetition (enough with the family popping in on Nia and Thomas uninvited). Weak characters like Toula’s dumb brother Nick (Louis Mandylor) and her slutty cousin Nikki (Gia Carides) do not grow any more tolerable when you see them every week. Worst of all, Nia has become more of a spineless daddy’s girl than Toula is in the film.

At the beginning of Greek Wedding, Toula is a 30-year-old frumpy " spinster " stuck working in her father’s restaurant. Her life changes with one glimpse of her Prince Charming, a tweedy professor, and she comes out of her shell. She takes computer classes at college, gets a new hairstyle and contact lenses, battles oppressively manipulative dad Gus (Michael Constantine) for her freedom and wins. With her sturdy, unabashedly Grecian looks and Everygirl charm, Vardalos made a terrific first screen impression, flaunting her ethnicity and winning you over with her chutzpah, like a Greek Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl.

But in the sit-com, Nia is unable to stand up to Gus (Constantine returns, minus the Windex he sprayed on everything as a cure-all in the movie). Toula’s triumph has been negated; Vardalos may be slimmer and have better clothes and hair than she did in the movie, but her TV character is a doormat, and the effect is depressing rather than comical. In fact, My Big Fat Greek Life plays like an Aegean-flavored Everybody Loves Raymond, with Vardalos as Ray and Constantine as Ray’s mother, but without Raymond’s flashes of family misery and nastiness. My Big Fat Greek Wedding was a pleasant enough confection, a honey-sweet bite of baklava. But as the sit-com demonstrates, a whole tray of it is just plain unappetizing.

An Article from Entertainment Weekly

Movie News
'Greek' Tragedy
Why ''My Big Fat Greek'' didn't translate to TV -- And how it was that Hollywood's Grecian earner turn into TV's feta-complete

By Lynette Rice

The moment the season finale of ''My Big Fat Greek Life'' wrapped in March, star and coexecutive producer Nia Vardalos marched off the set and begged a CBS honcho to cancel her comedy. That was about the only thing she and the network ever agreed on. After months of wrangling over the direction of the series -- which had the makings of a hit until the ratings dropped faster than an olive from a tree -- CBS officially axed the spin-off of ''My Big Fat Greek Wedding'' on May 14, after only seven episodes.

''So many people had so many different visions. They were not able to have a unified direction,'' says Christina Papadopoulos, a spokeswoman for Vardalos (who wouldn't comment). Small wonder, considering that the actress didn't really want to do the show.

In 2001, before Rita Wilson and Tom Hanks agreed to bring Vardalos' 1997 stage show to the big screen, CBS won a bidding war and committed seven figures to shoot a pilot based on her story (ugly duckling bags WASPy vegetarian). But when the film earned $241 million and she was on her way to an Oscar nomination, Vardalos told CBS she didn't want to play daddy's little Greek girl anymore. ''She's 40. She's been doing this story for years,'' argues her friend Jeff Rosenthal, a writer on the show. ''She wanted to move forward, not go back in time.''

CBS met her halfway: She got a post-honeymoon plot and the net got most of the movie's cast -- who weren't part of the original deal. But that wasn't enough to keep viewers interested. ''Life'' dropped a whopping 54 percent after its blockbuster Feb. 24 debut. ''The show had no emotional resonance, no real stakes,'' says a key Life source. ''She didn't have the expertise to make it work.'' She also couldn't blend her new stardom with the needs of an ensemble. Adds the source, ''Nia wanted most of the jokes for herself...to be a David Spade. But you can't give one-liners to a person who's not a comedic actress.'' Costar Andrea Martin could pull it off -- almost too well. At the final taping, a source says Vardalos threatened to walk out when Martin got the most laughs. ''Andrea was too big,'' says the source. ''But nothing else was funny.''

''It wasn't easy,'' says costar Louis Mandylor in Vardalos' defense. ''She had to act, produce, and do publicity.'' Adds her rep: ''The allegations about her being difficult and fighting with people on the set are ridiculous.''

And possibly irrelevant. Her agents say ''Life'''s failure hasn't slowed interest in Nia Vardalos, movie star. She's now filming ''Connie and Carla'' for Universal. ''The movie industry will allow a few more failures,'' says casting director Billy Hopkins (''Monster's Ball''). ''That's the way Hollywood judges you.''

For a Webpage with plenty of links to My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the movie from which this sitcom was spun- off from go to http://movies.about.com/od/mybigfatgreek/My_Big_Fat_Greek_Wedding_2002.htm