⁇ p>Country Comfort Review

About Tomatometer A series gets an Average Tomatometer when at least 50 percent of its seasons have a score. The Average Tomatometer is the sum of all season scores divided by the number of seasons with a Tomatometer.

Who Is Fran Drescher’S Character?

On the ‘90s sitcom “The Nanny,” Fran Drescher’s flighty character ends up becoming a childcare provider for a single father (Charles Shaughnessy) after she shows up on his doorstep bereft, having been recently dumped. Created by Caryn Lucas, an executive producer on “The Nanny” as well as the writer of “Miss Congeniality,” the show lacks any real signature other than a put-on, gaudy raunchiness that seems likely to alienate families with young children — who might have seemed the likeliest to put up with this show’s vacuousness. Beau (Eddie Cibrian) soon enough hires McPhee’s Bailey, an aspiring singer, to care for his five children, a process that has its ups (Bailey helps the most sullen of Beau’s children overcome the worst of her grief around the loss of her late mom) and downs (Bailey loses Mom’s guitar!).

When the plot machinations calm down enough to get Bailey and Beau alone in a room together, they have little even to say to one another, and the performances, delivered with a let’s-just-get-this-over-with tone, don’t help. McPhee is an uneasy comic lead and Cibrian — with whom she’s supposed to share a sparky chemistry, otherwise the show won’t work — feels checked-out from the first. This forces the kids to do the heavy lifting, and there is an uneasy adult wit burbling under lines written for minor and in some cases quite young characters.

“Dylan, if this is puberty for you, then I’m so out,” this child actor replies. Why is their father attracted to a woman who’s obviously wrong for him? “Men are visual,” this child declares.

The “Frozen” joke at the end of the line can’t salvage the gross, unsuited maturity of the beginning. None of these lines, delivered by an adult, would look much more than dated, but it’s a color that looks unappealing on performers who are still getting legally-mandated schooling on set. Why this show is positioned as “conservative” is somewhat baffling — this show’s child characters, for all that they wear crosses around their necks and help their dad care for his horses, are more obsessed with sex than their peers over on “Euphoria.”

It could be argued it represents a sort of exhaust valve that keeps some from turning down rabbit holes of resentment — but this show’s point of view on its characters’ cultural conservatism is completely upside-down, even hypocritical. It doesn’t really count as family-values TV if that family’s values go as deep as a belt buckle and a country tune. It’s hard to believe audiences could be fooled by this, though surely some will be.

Gay men, traditionally, are unusually forgiving of female artists for whom the industry can’t find a place. And — unlike her forbear, the sharply witty Fran Drescher on “The Nanny” — her benevolent cluelessness as incest-tinged jokes fly over her head can read as McPhee simply not getting the joke. “Country Comfort” debuts on Netflix March 19.