My Name is Earl holds a special place in my heart, but Raising Hope has safely usurped it as the modern epitome of lower class in sitcom form, a popular source of comedy for decades. The show starts humbly, introducing an unlikely cast for its parts but developing them well and establishing their histories as much as moving them forward. It’s the rare 23-minute episodic comedy that takes the time to keep up some sort of continuity from one week to the next, but Raising Hope does just that and even rewards viewers with all sorts of self-referential jokes to past episodes as well as the shows its cast previously starred in. At the base of it all is a solid writing staff cobbled together from the remnants of My Name is Earl and Better Off Ted, two shows canceled well before their time.
The already down-trodden life of Jimmy Chance (Lucas Neff) gets a little bit harder when a one-night stand with a serial killer (Bijou Phillips) on the run from the cops leaves him with a daughter named Hope (formerly Princess Beyonce) once the mother is toasted in the electric chair. Himself the child of a couple graced with parenthood before they were ready, Jimmy struggles to get his life in order so he can give Hope a better life than he had with his mother Virginia (Martha Plimpton) and father Burt(Garret Dillahunt) offering help and aggravation along the way. The newfound family of four lives in the house Jimmy’s senile great-grandmother (Cloris Leachman), leaving them with essentially two helpless souls to watch over, one at the dawn and the other at the dusk of their lives. To make ends meet, Jimmy leaves his daughter at a daycare program run by the musically inclined Shelley (Kate Micucci) as he works at the local grocery store with his perpetually unavailable, college educated crush Sabrina (Shannon Woodward).
Beyond the characters’ daily routines, many sitcoms seem reluctant to imply a previous history outside of what appears on screen, if they didn’t show it to us, they’re willing to assert nothing ever happened to their collection of characters prior to the show’s pilot episode. Raising Hope, however, in the tradition of Better Off Ted and My Name is Earl, revels in the creation of its characters’ histories and clearly takes delight in revisiting wacky moments from the past for the sake of establishing running jokes. Raising Hope is prime territory for this kind of storytelling as it compares the efforts of Jimmy in bringing up his daughter to the struggles of his parents who did the best with what they had. The writing is rather good, though its use of some less than great gags (like the family’s poor vocabulary) can be a bit tiring. Luckily the show’s faults are easy to overlook in the face of the cast’s performances and a lineup of cameos from the stars of Better Off Ted and My Name is Earl, it’s like a family reunion on a show all about the bonds between parents and their children.
Lucas Neff salvages a role which, if played tongue in cheek, could potentially have ruined the show. The character of Jimmy Chance requires absolute dedication to his naiveté, the result of a child raised in a household by two people still maturing themselves. Though Neff’s performance can lack nuance at times, for the most part he’s exactly what the show requires to work at all, but he’s not really the act of casting brilliance that elevates the show. The antics of Matha Plimpton and Garret Dillahunt as the experience-educated parents with little else going for them, make Raising Hope what it is. They carry off the characters with such panache that you actually believe someone could be stupid enough to seal an octogenarian in a plastic box to eliminate cigarette smoke from the house. The duo starts out a little hammy, but by the sixth episode they’re easily the show’s most clever concoction. Finally there’s Cloris Leachman, whose spaced out Maw Maw starts as more of a commentary on horrible ways to take care of the elderly but gradually evolves (via the writers giving her increasingly common periods of lucidity) into the primary anchor keeping the family connected to honesty.
DVD Bonus Features
A featurette covering the babies who portray Hope, a clip show of Martha Plimpton’s best moments as Virginia, a gag reel, and a behind the scenes look at the filming of the season finale are the more entertaining of the extras. An audio commentary on the pilot (along with the unaired network pilot), an extended cut of the finale, and deleted & extended scenes close out the disc.
"Raising Hope: The Complete First Season" is on sale September 20, 2011 and is not rated. Comedy. Directed by Michael Fresco, Eyal Gordin, Gregory Thomas Garcia. Written by Gregory Thomas Garcia, Bobby Bowman, Elijah Aron, Ralph Greene, Mike Mariano, Jordan Young, Timothy Stack, Christine Zander. Starring Cloris Leachman, Garret Dillahunt, Martha Plimpton, Lucas Neff, Shannon Woodward.
