Or, at the very least, someone equally fat. Over the next 30 minutes, this particular American housewife will obsessively attempt to fill the house that had been occupied by Fat Pam with … someone even fatter. Weight, in particular, that has the added audacity of being carried by a woman.Īmerican Housewife makes good on that promise (Fat Pam!), but it does so to a fault: The show’s pilot, it soon becomes wincingly clear, revolves entirely around the problem Katie lays out in her introduction. It’s Katie who admits, of Oliver, “I’m not gonna lie to you: We boned it pretty bad with this one.” And it’s Katie who, through her outspokenness, promises some much-needed RealTalk™ when it comes to that most still-taboo of subjects in American culture: weight. The show’s sympathies, though-as its title might also suggest-lie with Katie. Not Rain Man anxiety, but it’s not in the family newsletter.”

Keaton in the making and Anna-Kat (Julia Butters), the youngest-who we learn, per Katie’s narration, “has a touch of the anxieties. Their kids are Taylor (Meg Donnelly), a teenager who has just emerged from an awkward phase to become pretty and popular Oliver (Daniel DiMaggio), 12, an Alex P. Besides Katie (Katy Mixon), wife of one and mother of three, there’s Greg (Diedrich Bader), her husband. The Ottos are the American Family this time around. From the outset, via its talk of pee and Pam, the show promises that its gaze will be more gimlet-eyed than rosy-lensed that it will take the regressive idealism of the early family sitcom and replace it with misbehaving children, frazzled parents, and the overriding sense that there is never quite enough time to get done all the things that need doing.

With this, American Housewife, as its sweepingly sociological title might suggest, presents itself as yet one more example of the now-typical network sitcom: edgy, relatably wacky, normal in its abnormality. Katie interrupts her musings when she notices her young daughter, Anna-Kat, peeing on the family’s lawn. And once Fat Pam is gone, I am going to be the second fattest. She’s had enough of the skinnies in this town. You see, my neighbor, Fat Pam, is giving up and moving to Vermont. But it’s not coming soon enough to help me. They say one day a meteor will strike the earth, obliterating life as we know it.

Julia butters and kathy mixon