NBC's Indebted feels like it's barely trying to be an average sitcom

Indiewire

"With a familiar premise and old-fashioned aesthetic, Indebted isn’t trying to break new ground in the comedy world," says Ben Travers. "It’s not NBC’s next Good Place, pushing creative storytelling to heavenly heights, or even another savvy, single-cam workplace sitcom like Superstore. No, this family’s dysfunctional hijinks earn canned audience laughter for easy cracks about invasive in-laws misusing Facebook and dumb kids who think picking a banana is the same as building a robot. (That banana thing is weird, sure, but not inspired.) Indebted quickly accepts its place among the oh-so-typical multi-cam ranks, but it never embraces those roots. While the cast is solid and some wrinkles could be ironed out with time (like chemistry, pacing, and joke construction), too much of Indebted feels like it’s barely trying to be an average sitcom, let alone a great one. Disinterest lingers over a very conventional pilot, creating an odd mixture of over-polished structure and under-executed delivery."

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• Indebted makes the familiar look difficult: "Indebted bumbles around finding uncommitted shadings to the most basic of narratives," says Daniel Fienberg. "Young-ish couple (Adam Pally and Abby Elliott) has to deal with the perpetual presence of his clingy parents (Steven Weber and Fran Drescher). Easy, right? It's Everybody Loves Raymond and countless lesser sitcoms...There's indeed a hypothetically interesting show here and it actually cheats some familiar sitcom expectations about failure-to-launch Millennials and their Boomer parents, and contributes to the discourse about cost of health care in America and about differences in parenting between generations. Except that most of those elements aren't mentioned at all in the next two episodes. I can't say for sure if the parents are now living with Dave and Rebecca or if they're just nearby, and it really shouldn't matter because none of this needs to be convoluted; it's just bad table-setting. I'm also not sure what any of the characters do for a living or much of anything other than that they're very superficially Jewish, which I respect if nothing else."
• Indebted's problem is how it treats debt and fiscal irresponsibility like a joke: "No one struggles. Debt is a joke to Indebted," says Tim Surette. "It's the means to a sitcom premise and not one of the cruel realities facing millions of people in our country and all over the world today...It would be so easy for Indebted to make empty bank accounts feel like a problem, but it ignores it altogether because it accomplished what was needed to pitch the show to networks: it got the parents in the house."
• Abby Elliott has a past connection with co-star Steven Weber: "I was his kids' nanny"
• Adam Pally explains how he might be TV's first hypebeast sitcom dad
• Fran Drescher on returning to network TV after starring in TV Land's Happily Divorced: "I was ready to go back into the major leagues"
• Indebted role was written for a "Fran Drescher type," but not for Drescher herself: Drescher said she had to make a few adjustments before signing on. “People are used to seeing an annoying mother-in-law in a sitcom, but that’s not what I signed up for,” Drescher said. “When you have somebody whose persona is bigger than the part, you got to make it right for me. Or why have me?”