Here's a TV mystery for you: Beginning tonight, ABC's
According to Jim is back. In prime time. With new episodes. Starting its eighth season.
It's an inexplicable rebound, more improbable than the return from the ashes of Fox's Family Guy or, to go all the way out on the TV limb, the updating of The Bionic Woman and Knight Rider. Already, Jim Belushi has starred on this ABC sitcom two years longer than his brother, John, appeared on Saturday Night Live.
But here's what really, really astounds me about According to Jim. Say what you will about it -- and I'll start by saying it's not funny -- it is a situation comedy about what used to be known as a nuclear family. Husband, wife, kids. First marriage.
This particular comedy situation, in the history of situation comedies, was all over the place in the 1950s and 1960s. But where is it as we inch towards 2009?
On Fox, you can find such nuclear families on The Simpsons and King of the Hill -- but those shows are animated. What other half-hour comedies in prime time right now feature a mom-and-pop-and-kids operation?
Well, there's Everybody Hates Chris on the CW. And...
And...
And, except for According to Jim, that's it.
According to me, anyway.
And that, no less so than the return of Jim, is astounding.