S11.E01: New Kids on the Block

[JTMacc99]

Haley is determined to follow the advice in her parenting books with the twins, but Phil and Claire think their old methods are better. Meanwhile, Manny is set to direct Jay's dog bed commercial in the hopes of winning his ex-girlfriend back.

[SoMuchTV]

Ah, giving the babies formula and pacifiers against mom's wishes.  Always hilarious.  Not.

On a completely unrelated note, anyone know where I can get one of those pacifiers for the grandkid?  It's okay, he's already a cat person.

[ams1001]

Cam is as inappropriate and  insufferable as ever...

(Fun fact: To Tell the Truth had a dog mayor on this past week and one of the imposters was a French Bulldog who played Stella.)

36 minutes ago, SoMuchTV said:

Ah, giving the babies formula and pacifiers against mom's wishes.  Always hilarious.  Not.

On a completely unrelated note, anyone know where I can get one of those pacifiers for the grandkid?  It's okay, he's already a cat person.

Didn't find that particular one but some fun ones here... 👶🏻

[Bulldog]

Its so clear that everyone involved is simply going thru the motions and collecting a paycheck.  The show should have been put out of its misery a few seasons ago.

[Kiddvideo]

All that screaming. And then there were the babies. Only part I enjoyed was Luke walking out of the house after Haley scaled the roof. That must’ve been 3 or 4 seconds.

[tennisgurl]

Those pacifiers were cute and I liked the twist with Cam and the theater kids (but holy CRAP are Mitch and Cam passive aggressive) but mostly it just seemed like everyone was just going through the motions. Thank God this is the last season, because it’s painfully obvious that just about everyone involved in this show is over it. 

[Snow Apple]

Is that why Manny's ex have the most screen time repeating her lines over and over and over? Because the regulars are over it? That explains a lot.

[ams1001]

2 hours ago, Snow Apple said:

Is that why Manny's ex have the most screen time repeating her lines over and over and over? 

Oh, jeez that was annoying. And with every repetition she just sounded more and more angry. Yeah, that'll sell whimsical dog beds. 🙄

[ljenkins782]

12 hours ago, SoMuchTV said:

Ah, giving the babies formula and pacifiers against mom's wishes.  Always hilarious.  Not.

Ugh, such a tired, and totally not okay, cliche. Also, not funny, so why this was the running theme in a sitcom is beyond me.

Quote

Its so clear that everyone involved is simply going thru the motions and collecting a paycheck.  The show should have been put out of its misery a few seasons ago.

They had ONE decent episode last season (the last one) that wrapped on a note-perfect, full-circle ending for the series, why did they not stop there? 

This episode was painfully unfunny and the actors were at their most cartoonish. Dylan used to be an occasionally funny character, but that actor can no longer deliver a line to save his life. Sarah Hyland has fallen into some weird speaking pattern that makes all of her lines sound off, same with Julie Bowen, Sofia Vergara, and half the rest of the cast. 

Even Ed O'Neill can barely sell a joke anymore and he used to be the rock of the series. 

Strangely enough, Luke seems to have the best lines and line delivery these days, and he used to be the worst one. 

[Blakeston]

My least favorite part was Gloria giving Manny the same tips on how to get a woman that he’d receive from some “pick-up artist” or incel.

”Make her think she’s doing badly, so that she’ll crave your approval!” Blech.

[tennisgurl]

3 hours ago, Blakeston said:

My least favorite part was Gloria giving Manny the same tips on how to get a woman that he’d receive from some “pick-up artist” or incel.

Creepy fake nice guy Manny is my least favorite Manny story, and enabler creepy Gloria is the worst kind of Gloria story.  

[retired watcher]

This show has jumped the shark and hit the wall. Bored from minute 1.

[Bulldog]

21 minutes ago, tennisgurl said:

Creepy fake nice guy Manny is my least favorite Manny story

Its hard for me to believe that in the early seasons, Manny was my favorite character on this show.  The character has not aged well at all.

[Koalagirl]

I wonder if Phil bursting out laughing at the baby with the cigar pacifier was completely unscripted. I caught Clare starting to laugh too just as the scene cut.  That was the best part of the show for me. 

[Aileen]

I thought this episode was awful 😞  The last finale would have been a perfect ending. 

And Alex getting kissed by some guy when she didn't welcome it and then feeling threatened by all then men around her?? HI-larious.  🙄

[biakbiak]

I literally had to ffwd through the Manny/ex/Gloria scenes. Not that the others were super great but that was unbearable.

[Bobbin]

Cam was so outrageously over the top that I should have known it was all a put-on. But I didn't. Good one. Well done.

The non-stop crying babies and frazzled Haley and Manny predictably not knowing when to quit got to be too much for me. Have the writers lost their sense of timing?

[JenLily]

10 minutes ago, Bobbin said:

Cam was so outrageously over the top that I should have known it was all a put-on. But I didn't. Good one. Well done.

Same. The whole episode I kept thinking, "This isn't like Cam. He'd never say things like that to his students. What is going on with him?" It wasn't until about a minute before the reveal that I finally cottoned on to what was happening.

[Blakeston]

Mitch and Cam haven't seemed like they can stand each other since the first season, but at least in the olden days Mitch had some decent schemes.

Now he just tosses one of Cam's precious clown mementos in the trash, and assumes he won't notice? That's Dylan-level stupidity there.

[ams1001]

On the up side...Dylan got a haircut...

[Ottis]

That was both horrible and annoying. Crying babies and accusatory Cam and needy Manny. Ugh. 

I did like Cam’s double entendres. 

Edited September 27, 2019 by Ottis

[Quickbeam]

I had to fast forward through Manny and the girlfriend. It was painful to watch.

[xingu]

If my late husband (rest his soul) threw away one of my prized possessions it would be game over.  Don't touch my stuff.  But this show doesn't deal in reality.  Are we supposed to believe that Asshat has tolerated Cam and all his clownsicle whims over the years, and this is the tipping point?  He didn't just hide the clown:  HE THREW IT AWAY.   Passive/Agressive much?

As a gay man, I've never liked how they are portrayed.

But Dylan's reading of:  "My gay uncleses", will never not be funny to me.

[tribeca]

I really hated how everyone just ignored Alex. Even her grandpa who is the one who usually listens to her 

[BusyOctober]

This show was DOA the minute the announced it was coming back for a final season.  It's been on life support for several years.  None of the actors seem into it. At all. Ditto for whatever 4th string writing staff is churning out these HI-larious scripts.

The adult kids used to be fairly decent child actors.  Now as grown ups, their acting skills have dwindled. I cannot stand Manny, his hats, his whimsy or his girlfriend  Cam & Mitch are unbearable individually, and more so as a married couple.  Claire & Phil have done a miserable job as parents.  Gloria is so one dimensional - which ironic since all her plots revolve around her very prominent 3-D "assets". Jay was the semi-voice of reason, but one character cannot keep this sinking ensemble ship afloat.  Other than a few, very scarce moments of real emotional connections between a set of characters, this family appears to actively hate each other.  And thanks to the trope-y writing, half-assed acting and horrible characters, I do too.

[PaulaO]

I watched the first few minutes and turned it off when the babies started screaming.  I'm not even going to bother watching the rest of the season.

[Guest]

9 hours ago, BusyOctober said:

This show was DOA the minute the announced it was coming back for a final season.  It's been on life support for several years.  None of the actors seem into it. At all. Ditto for whatever 4th string writing staff is churning out these HI-larious scripts.

The adult kids used to be fairly decent child actors.  Now as grown ups, their acting skills have dwindled. 

Kids are typically cast for cuteness and not acting ability (with the rare exceptions being the Stranger Things kids and those twins from Jane the Virgin/Single Parents), so lack of skill/training becomes painfully apparent the older they get. That's my theory on why most child actors suck as adults and fail to make the transition into a real career. When you have everyone fawning over how amazing and special you are due to cuteness, you get a big ego and coast instead of working on the actual acting part. Either that, or as might be the case with Manny and Luke, they have no real interest in seriously pursuing acting as adults and are just biding time until their contracts run out. In fairness, when they were cast at 9/10, they could've never realized they'd still be doing the show at 20. In their case, I'd be annoyed that the writers hadn't been able to come up with any post-puberty plots for me beyond "horny pervert" or at best "pathetic loser tries to get girl." Manny in particular was a delightfully quirky child whose niche interests were funny, but as an adult those same personality traits make him come off as a pretentious, deluded incel.

Haley and Alex especially just seem to hate being there.

[Calvada]

Hey idiots, if the car put baby Haley to sleep, maybe it would work for the twins.  

I had to FF through the Cam/Mitchell scenes and the tone deaf Gloria/Manny scenes (what the fuck was that? so incredibly offensive - did none of the writers watch the news in the past year?), so I watched the episode in about 9 minutes.  

My niece is one of those "you did it all wrong, Mom & Dad: I'll do it better" type of moms, so I (initially) found that story line amusing.  Especially since my niece and her siblings are caring, kind and responsible adults, so just how terrible was the parenting they received?  My sister just smiles and waits for her granddaughter to reach the age of 13.

[salmondean]

This episode was paaaaaaainful, especially the Mitch/Cam plotline. It sure was fun to watch Cam call a group of mostly POC kids "garbage" and "monsters" almost the entire time. I know the reveal at the end that the kids were actors was supposed to wipe the slate clean and I realized what was happening a little bit before the reveal, but the fact that I was like "yeah, Cam is enough of a jerk to viciously turn on a group of kids if he suspected they took one of his possessions" for so much of the plotline is...not great. Not to mention the fact that MITCH believed his own husband was genuine in saying all of those insulting things and just stood by and let him belittle them until he finally confessed. And was the part about Mitch saying he would just blame the missing clown on the "cleaning lady" supposed to be...funny? It's hard to believe that they were two of my favorite characters in season one.

Combined with the grossness of the Manny plotline and the joke(?) about Alex missing the safety of female company, this episode felt even more out of touch that usual.

I did like Phil's real estate themed lullabies though! That was cute

[Deskisamess]

22 minutes of unfunny. The only thing that initially gave us hope was the set used for Alex's scenes. We kept hoping "No Kevin!" to show up, or for someone to break out the karaoke machine. (Geico commercial for those who don't know what I'm talking about)

Such a tired show, with a group of characters who've not grown or changed in 10 years.

The only thing that was funny were the bubba baby pacifiers. That one with the cigar is great!

[foxfreakinmulder]

1 hour ago, Deskisamess said:

The only thing that was funny were the bubba baby pacifiers. That one with the cigar is great!

I agree. That funny looking pacifier and Phil saying "babies shouldn't smoke" was the only time I laughed.

How old is Lily? Shouldn't she be 10 or 11 years old, why does she look more like 16 or 17?

[biakbiak]

40 minutes ago, foxfreakinmulder said:

How old is Lily? Shouldn't she be 10 or 11 years old, why does she look more like 16 or 17?

The actress is 12.

[foxfreakinmulder]

1 minute ago, biakbiak said:

The actress is 12.

Thank you, biakbiak :-) Since she was born in season one I thought she should be around the same age as the show but she's tall for her age and looks older than 12.

[readster]

1 hour ago, foxfreakinmulder said:

Thank you, biakbiak 🙂 Since she was born in season one I thought she should be around the same age as the show but she's tall for her age and looks older than 12.

Yes, but she isn't the original twins who played Lily who hated playing the character after they were old enough to talk and understand lines. Of course, they have turned Lily into such a brat (of course look at Cam and Mitch). It just proves the show, while this is officially it's LAST season. Showed it should have ended last year instead of this upcoming May. Because the writers have proven, they don't have shit for stories and the twins was just an excuse to get more money out of ABC.

[Robert Lynch]

Maybe the finale would be all a bad dream and this season never happened.

[NUguy514]

Yep, I'm done.  Everything in every storyline was gross and offensive, and I just can't anymore.

[MaryMitch]

I'm still enjoying the show, especially Phil.

[Aryanna]

On 9/26/2019 at 5:30 PM, ams1001 said:

On the up side...Dylan got a haircut...

If they'd used garden shears and started about six inches lower, that'd have been great.

This show has not been good for the last few years but usually I find something to like about each episode. This episode was all bad. I didn't like anything about it.

[ljenkins782]

On 9/29/2019 at 12:06 AM, NUguy514 said:

Yep, I'm done.  Everything in every storyline was gross and offensive, and I just can't anymore.

I was especially irked by the Claire/Haley storyline. If they wanted to go the route of the "new mother thinks she knows better than her own mother" trope, they should have made Haley's views completely out there. They have the NERP storyline already in place, if it had been Haley getting all her child-rearing ideas from a batshit crazy place like NERP, that could have been funny. 

But her deciding how she wants to feed her babies and choosing not to use pacifiers are not outlandish ideas and they should be respected. It irks me that the show was trying make Haley look stupid and wrong for those things, when they're perfectly reasonable.

[Enigma X]

Manny's existence annoys me, but his and Gloria's plot was just demeaning and ridiculous.

[albinerhawk]

2 hours ago, ljenkins782 said:

I was especially irked by the Claire/Haley storyline. If they wanted to go the route of the "new mother thinks she knows better than her own mother" trope, they should have made Haley's views completely out there. They have the NERP storyline already in place, if it had been Haley getting all her child-rearing ideas from a batshit crazy place like NERP, that could have been funny. 

But her deciding how she wants to feed her babies and choosing not to use pacifiers are not outlandish ideas and they should be respected. It irks me that the show was trying make Haley look stupid and wrong for those things, when they're perfectly reasonable.

As a mom with three under five, I totally agree. Doctors recommend against pacifiers and bottles for breastfed babies in young infants as this can develop into "nipple confusion". There is actually a lot of advice out there against practices that a generation ago engaged in. For example, it used to be commonplace to put rice cereal in a bottle to help a baby sleep, but that is now found to be dangerous. Older caregivers have been known to put blankets on babies, but this is also a safety hazard since babies can pull the blanket up over their faces. 

That being said, Dylan and Haley are living with Haley's parents. While I think Haley's totally sane parenting decisions should be abided by there should be some discussion. My husband and I have discussions on raising our children, and he usually goes by my decisions as I do more research. Similarly Haley and Dylan are relying on Haley's parents for help and as such there should be more collaboration than dictation on Haley's part. At least then, maybe Phil and Claire will have a better appreciation for Haley's decisions.

[AnimeMania]

1 hour ago, albinerhawk said:

While I think Haley's totally sane parenting decisions should be abided by there should be some discussion.

I am guessing that Haley is getting some pushback from her parents because all of parenting decisions came from a single book.

[biakbiak]

13 minutes ago, AnimeMania said:

I am guessing that Haley is getting some pushback from her parents because all of parenting decisions came from a single book.

Why should that matter if it’s valid parenting advice. Lots of people have one “bible” that they vibe/agree with and go with that. The issue seemed to be that her choices were different than their choices and that is a load of crap.

Edited September 30, 2019 by biakbiak

[ljenkins782]

21 hours ago, albinerhawk said:

As a mom with three under five, I totally agree. Doctors recommend against pacifiers and bottles for breastfed babies in young infants as this can develop into "nipple confusion". There is actually a lot of advice out there against practices that a generation ago engaged in. For example, it used to be commonplace to put rice cereal in a bottle to help a baby sleep, but that is now found to be dangerous. Older caregivers have been known to put blankets on babies, but this is also a safety hazard since babies can pull the blanket up over their faces. 

That being said, Dylan and Haley are living with Haley's parents. While I think Haley's totally sane parenting decisions should be abided by there should be some discussion. My husband and I have discussions on raising our children, and he usually goes by my decisions as I do more research. Similarly Haley and Dylan are relying on Haley's parents for help and as such there should be more collaboration than dictation on Haley's part. At least then, maybe Phil and Claire will have a better appreciation for Haley's decisions.

That would involve Claire being able to put her own opinions aside and consider someone else's point of view. In the 10 years that this show has been on the air, has that ever happened? She's been trying to run all the kids' lives since they were born, that's not going to stop with the new generation.

If anyone was dictating, it was definitely Claire. She heard what Haley said, cast it aside because she felt she knew better and just did what she wanted to do. 

[albinerhawk]

58 minutes ago, ljenkins782 said:

That would involve Claire being able to put her own opinions aside and consider someone else's point of view. In the 10 years that this show has been on the air, has that ever happened? She's been trying to run all the kids' lives since they were born, that's not going to stop with the new generation.

If anyone was dictating, it was definitely Claire. She heard what Haley said, cast it aside because she felt she knew better and just did what she wanted to do. 

I agree with what you're saying. I was just trying to point out that not only are Phil and Claire providing a roof over their heads, they are being active caregivers to the twins. They seem to be expending more energy than Dylan to be honest. I just think some deference should be given, but in contrast to that they should also be willing to accept Haley's parenting choices.

[ItCouldBeWorse]

On 9/30/2019 at 4:24 PM, biakbiak said:

Why should that matter if it’s valid parenting advice. Lots of people have one “bible” that they vibe/agree with and go with that. The issue seemed to be that her choices were different than their choices and that is a load of crap.

One of the pieces of advice was to not look the babies in the face.  That makes the entire book suspect.

Also, if the babies are screaming all night to the extent that Claire and Phil can't sleep either, then it's reasonable to investigate if the babies are receiving enough mother's milk (which can be very challenging with twins) or if some supplementation is needed.  Haley wouldn't even discuss it.

Edited October 3, 2019 by ItCouldBeWorse

[biakbiak]

9 minutes ago, ItCouldBeWorse said:

One of the pieces of advice was to not look the babies in the face.  That makes the entire book suspect.

It was specifically to not make eye contact/engage with them when they are settling down to sleep so that they learn to self soothe hardly uncommon advice.

9 minutes ago, ItCouldBeWorse said:

Haley wouldn't even discuss i

That’s between Hailey and her doctor not her and Claire.

Edited October 3, 2019 by biakbiak

[ItCouldBeWorse]

7 minutes ago, biakbiak said:

It was specifically to not make eye contact/engage with them when they are settling down to sleep so that they learn to self soothe hardly uncommon advice.

That’s between Hailey and her doctor not her and Claire.

Claire: "And the pediatrician said it was perfectly healthy."  So Haley is following Your Parents Did Everything Wrong over the advice of the twins' pediatrician.

10 minutes ago, biakbiak said:

19 minutes ago, ItCouldBeWorse said:

One of the pieces of advice was to not look the babies in the face.  That makes the entire book suspect.

It was specifically to not make eye contact/engage with them when they are settling down to sleep so that they learn to self soothe hardly uncommon advice.

The author, "a celebrated pediatric life coach" also states that negativity can cause a peanut allergy.  Claire shouldn't make all the decisions, but the book is clearly meant to be ridiculous.

[biakbiak]

8 minutes ago, ItCouldBeWorse said:

The author, "a celebrated pediatric life coach" also states that negativity can cause a peanut allergy.  Claire shouldn't make all the decisions, but the book is clearly meant to be ridiculous.

But none of the advice she was using was ridiculous just different. If they were trying to suggest she was making ridiculous choices they chose the wrong things because all the examples is fairly common advice.

Edited October 3, 2019 by biakbiak

[Enigma X]

I am so glad that they did not make the advice that Haley was using ridiculous. We already know that Haley is the ditzy daughter. She does not need to be the ditzy mother too.