Kyra Sedgwick-led Call Your Mother is too afraid to give its main character any flaws

The Hollywood Reporter

The ABC empty nester sitcom from The New Adventures of Old Christine creator Kari Lizer debuts with stock characters and unfunny jokes, while Sedgwick's Jean isn't written to be interesting. "TV has become a more hospitable place for female midlife-crisis stories, but Jean — at least in the Call Your Mother pilot, the only episode made available to critics — is shorn of the kind of thorns, idiosyncrasies and even emotional turbulence that almost always accompany such plights," says Inkoo Kang.

ALSO:

• Call Your Mother's unwillingness to take a risk results in the finished product being not much of anything at all
• Why Call Your Mother is set in the post-COVID world: "Covid is part of the world, we just had the decision to start the series after we were all quarantined and in masks because frankly, we had enough of that," says creator Kari Lizer.