Every Tuesday night I call my dad on the East Coast and I ask him how was
The Goldbergs? Every week he tells me that the mom (Wendi McLendon-Covey) is so bad. Bad as in the way she tortures her poor children in the name of love. Well tonight at 9p on ABC, you will be so happy she is not your mom!
Barry (Troy Gentile) finally gets his license and before he even takes the car out for a ride, his mother goes over the rules of driving with him. She tells him where he can go and where he can’t, but the one rule he must follow is that he has to call her when he gets. Since this is ’80something, people don’t have cells phones readily available to them like we do today. So when he gets to his destination, he doesn’t call his mom. If you have been watching the show since week one, you know where this going to go. If you haven’t, she totally embarrasses him.
When he gets home, his older sister, Erica (Hayley Orrantia), gets to him before their mom does and explains to him how to get around her rules. So now that he knows how to beat his mom, both kids plan to drive to the party in the woods. When Barry gets there, he asks his sister where there’s a phone so he can call home. She reminds him where the party is and now he has to go looking in the woods to find a phone. Pay phones were widely available back in the ’80something, but that doesn’t mean that you could find an operational one in the woods. So will he find one before his mom sends the troops out to find her son?
And Barry isn’t the only person she wants to put a ball a chain on, she also bought Pops (George Segal) a present. That gift is a Life Alert button and he doesn’t want to wear it. Something he might reconsider when he’s fallen and he can’t get up! Yes, the show goes there and it will have you laughing so hard that you will have fallen and can’t get up.
Now I don’t want to forget about the other guys on the show. Murray (Jeff Garlin) wants to use the VCR (it was the thing we used to record shows on television before Tivos/DVRs) to record the Phillies’ World Series game, but he can’t figure out how to do it. Therefore, Adam (Sean Giambrone) tries to teach him, but really the youngest Goldberg is just messing with his dad. It is a fun family moment that we have all had. It’s fun to know something our parents don’t and then to mess with them when we try to teach them the correct way to do it.
It is moments like that, that makes, the recently picked up for a full season, The Goldbergs, my favorite new show of the season. The family scenarios are timeless just like the ‘80s are to the sitcom. Everyone can say that they have experienced something from each episode in their lives when they were growing up. Thus when you get to experience them all over again on an endearing show like this one, you find yourself appreciating those fun memories all over again or having a whole new appreciation for them for the first time.
So tune in to The Goldbergs tonight and every Tuesday at 9p for a show that is guaranteed to bring a smile to your face every week as it touches your heart.
