'Finally, an old-fashioned sitcom': NBC thinks you miss boring TV, and it might be right

Newlyweds premieres Friday, October 23, on NBC: a multi-camera, 21-minute sitcom about Jeanie (Téa Leoni) and Tony (Tim Daly), two older adults who meet on a blind date and impulsively marry. Leoni and Daly are married in real life — the Madam Secretary co-stars wed in 2025 — and Jamie Lee Curtis co-created the show with Gail Lerner, plays Tony's ex-wife Claudia, and executive produces, with sitcom veteran Pamela Fryman directing the pilot.

The critical reception has organized itself around one word. The Hollywood Reporter's review headline calls it an "Old-Fashioned NBC Sitcom"; MediaPost's Adam Buckman goes further, dinging the crude jokes and the throwback audience reactions of a three-camera relic. Meanwhile, under NBC's own trailer, the two top comments are "this feels like a '90s sitcom in the best way" (221 upvotes) and "Finally, an old-fashioned sitcom!" (89 upvotes).

It's the same observation on both sides of the screen — delivered by critics as a diagnosis and by viewers as a request. The comedy on TV right now runs on discomfort — single-camera, improv-flavored, engineered to make you watch through your fingers — and NBC is betting there's an audience that wants jokes it can relax into. Lerner described the show as "a sort of an aspirational love show," and Curtis compressed the pitch to one line: "I think people love 'love' and family."

Daly, for his part, sounds like a man who knows the format is a bet:

"There is an audience. It's just a matter of us finding them and them finding us."

— Tim Daly, to Lee Enterprises

The asterisk behind the scenes

The road to Friday has not been cozy. The show was originally set up at Netflix with Curtis attached to star; it moved to NBC with Leoni and Daly as leads in February 2026, got its pilot order in January and a series order in May.

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Then, about two weeks before the premiere, co-creator and showrunner Gail Lerner was fired — she announced it herself on Instagram, citing "creative differences" she declined to specify, after working through production of six episodes. Buckman's MediaPost column treats the exit as the bad omen such firings usually are.

NBC ordered the pilot in January, the series in May, and parted with the co-creator two weeks before launch. The trailer comments never wavered.

So the premiere is a cleaner test than NBC probably wanted: not whether this particular creative team can revive the old-fashioned sitcom, but whether the appetite for one survives contact with an actual episode. The comment section has already placed its order.

Previously we wrote: Julia Stiles asked Michelle Williams before her Heath Ledger tribute on Dancing With the Stars