'Outmatched' Episode 1: The fun take on parenting genius children makes for a delightful family sitcom
This article contains spoilers for 'Outmatched' Season 1
The pilot of 'Outmatched' aired on January 24 and there is one thing for sure, parenting geniuses is as hard as one would expect. This new TV sitcom added a little stress comedy as it chronicles the lives of a "normal" Atlantic City family — Cay, a casino pit boss; Mike, her husband and a handyman; and their highly gifted children.
Barely having gotten through high school themselves, Cay (Maggie Lawson) and Mike (Jason Biggs) have to now tweak traditional parenting methods to keep up with big egos of little humans.
Wanting to bring in "normalcy to their kids' unconventional childhoods", they set off on a mission of frustrated laughter — a Boardwalk trip to "simple dumber times". All they had to do was "force" three kid geniuses — Brian (Connor Kalopsis), Nicole (Ashley Boettcher) and Marc (Jack Stanton) — to go to the Boardwalk. Oh, and they also had to grab their fourth child Leila (Oakley Bull), the "star" of the family who wants to be a waffle.
To escape their "weird children", the young, frustrated couple retreat to their basement to come up with a plan. Having just tested Marc, who was deemed gifted with an insanely high IQ score, they desperately needed a "normal day out". But of course, with children who know how to build computers, the family fails to even leave the house. Meanwhile, Brian is chilling with his 35-year-old computational physics friend from astronomical society message boards while another kid is reading sheet music off walls.
It seems as though 'Rick and Morty' jokes aren't going to suffice with this intellectual trio and maybe the "children" need to parent the "parents". Not taking a break from dissecting and cloning animals, they also seem to have forgotten their mother's "birthday". But there is a sweet ending. The genius children eventually use their gifts to apologize to their mom with, well, normal cookies. "Score 1 for the dummies!"
A fun and oddly hilarious bunch, this pilot was a light introduction to the odd parent-kid dynamics of a family and we wonder what antics the children are up to next week. If you have watched 'Phineas and Ferb', you know what to expect — and just not in cartoon form.
'Outmatched' airs every Thursday at 7.30 pm CST on Fox.
