Jamie Lee Curtis Is Bringing Back the Classic Sitcom With 'Newlyweds' | Review
Taylor Gates is an Indiana native who earned her BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Evansville. She fell in love with entertainment by watching shows about chaotic families like Full House, The Nanny, Gilmore Girls, and The Fosters.
After college, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career as a writer, editor, and filmmaker. Today, she’s a sucker for dramedies — especially coming-of-age stories centering around complex female and LGBTQ+ characters. She has been with Collider since May 2022.
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True comedies are becoming rarer and rarer, with dramedies overwhelmingly taking over in popularity nowadays. While shows like Friends and Seinfeld dominated in the ‘90s, multi-camera sitcoms filmed in front of a live studio audience are a truly endangered species, with only a handful still being made. Newlyweds is trying to bring the beloved medium back, enlisting a charismatic real-life couple, a legendary director, and a smattering of up-and-coming actors to do the job.
What Is ‘Newlyweds’ About?
Newlyweds opens with Jeanie (Téa Leoni) and James (Tim Daly) attempting to avoid the blind date their mutual friend Dan (Al Madrigal) set them up on. When they accidentally cross paths, however, they can’t deny their instant attraction and end up having dinner after all. They quickly discover they have a lot in common — and a lot, well, not in common. They both work at school, but Jeanie teaches eighth-grade science, while James is a college philosophy professor. Jeanie’s husband has recently died, whereas James went through a nasty divorce with his ex-wife, Claudia (Jamie Lee Curtis). Jeanie is eccentric and free-spirited; James is pragmatic and grounded.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Iconic Romance Is Your Favorite? Harry & Sally · Love & Basketball · Heated Rivalry · Titanic
Four great love stories, and four completely different ideas of what love actually is. One is a friendship that took twelve years to admit itself. One is two people who refuse to stop competing. One happens entirely behind closed doors. And one lasts five days and never stops mattering. Eight questions decide which one is really yours.
🍂Harry & Sally(1989)
🏀Love & Basketball(2000)
🏒Heated Rivalry(HBO Max)
🚢Titanic(1997)
01
How does your love story start? The first scene tells you what kind of story this is going to be.
02
What do the two of you keep arguing about? Every great romance has one fight it has over and over.
03
How do you show somebody that you love them? Grand gestures are easy to write. This is the harder question.
04
What is actually standing in the way? There is always something. Which something tells you the genre.
05
Which romantic moment gets you every single time? Be honest. There is one that works on you and you know which.
06
What would you actually risk for the right person? Every romance asks this. Most people find out far too late.
07
Where are the two of you in ten years? Some love stories are about the meeting. Some are about the staying.
08
Which of these sounds most like something you would say? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your romance.
Roll The Credits Your Romance Is…
Four love stories, four completely different ideas of what it means to be somebody's person. This is the one that matches how you actually fall, and what it would ask of you.
Harry & Sally
You do not fall for strangers. You fall for the person you have already been talking to for years, which is the slowest and by some distance the most durable way anybody has found to do this.
- When Harry Met Sally made the case that the best romance is an argument you enjoy, conducted over a decade, by two people refusing to admit what is happening.
- You want to be known rather than swept away. Somebody who remembers your worst story is doing better work than anybody arriving with flowers.
- The film is unusually honest about timing. These two are wrong for each other repeatedly until suddenly they are not, and neither of them engineered it.
- You would still be talking about everything at eighty. That is the entire promise.
Love & Basketball
You want a partner, not an audience. Somebody who wants their own life as badly as you want yours, and who would never ask you to be smaller to make the relationship easier.
- This is the rare romance where both people have a real career and the film takes both of them equally seriously.
- You would rather be pushed than protected. The right person for you is also a bit of a rival, and that never entirely goes away.
- It understands the actual problem in ambitious relationships. Not whether you love each other, but whose turn it is this year.
- You would still be competing at forty. That is how you would know it was working.
Heated Rivalry
The intensity was never the problem. The secrecy is. You are drawn to a love that lives entirely in private, and to the particular ache of wanting somebody you are not supposed to want.
- Heated Rivalry runs on the oldest engine in romance: two people on opposite sides, meeting in secret, getting far more attached than either of them planned.
- You keep your private life genuinely private, and something in you finds hidden things more real than public ones.
- The tension is not only between the two of them. It is between what they have and what it would cost either one to say it out loud.
- Years of this, and the whole story is really about whether either of them will finally stop hiding.
Titanic
You do not do this cautiously. When it happens for you it is immediate and total and it rearranges everything, and you would not accept a smaller version of it.
- Titanic gave us the biggest romance in film history and then made it last about five days, which is precisely the point of it.
- You measure love by intensity rather than duration. A few days of the real thing beats decades of something merely comfortable.
- The film is not only about the romance. It is about a woman who went on to live an enormous life afterwards because of it.
- You would still be telling this story at a hundred years old, and telling it exactly the same way.
Despite the complications they foresee arising — especially considering James is planning on going to Norway on a long work trip the day after their date — the two stay in touch and end up spontaneously getting married after only knowing each other for a few weeks. In addition to Claudia’s meddling nature and bitter attitude, Jeanie’s twentysomething children Lolo (Ignacio Diaz-Silverio) and Poppy (Emma Meisel) also have to wrap their heads around their mother getting remarried so quickly. If that wasn't enough, James’ teaching assistant Arvid (Bill O'Neill) invites himself into the mix by following James from Norway to pursue his dream of living in California. Jeanie and James’ relationship is tested by all of these outside voices, as well as questions of where the two are going to live and how they’re going to manage a honeymoon in the middle of the school year.
‘Newlyweds’ Features an Eclectic Cast of Promising Characters
The fact that Leoni and Daly have excellent chemistry should come as no surprise, as the two played one of the most authentic married couples on TV in Madam Secretary. Not only that, but the two fell in love on that set and tied the knot in real life last year after 10 years of dating. Their relationship alone is reason enough to not only make you tune in but to keep you watching. It’s immediately clear how comfortable they are with one another, bringing a natural, lived-in quality to the central dynamic that’s nearly impossible to replicate without having an offscreen connection. Not only that, but it’s obvious how much fun they’re having being silly, whether it’s dirty talk about roasting vegetables or flirtatiously distracting each other from work. They bring a refreshing earnestness and playfulness that’s largely missing from television these days.
The other cast members are wonderful as well. Though Lolo and Poppy don’t get a ton to do yet, Diaz-Silverio and Meisel’s solid performances make me hopeful that will change as more episodes are released. Sitcoms often rely on precocious children, rebellious teenagers, or lazy adult kids who refuse to move out, so the dynamic between Jeanie and her young 20-somethings who still live at home makes for a welcome change. The fact that the two recently lost their father and that Lolo was one of Jeanie’s former students who was adopted as an older teen adds interesting layers to the dynamic that the show would do well to explore on a deeper level.
Claudia is the type of character who walks a thin line between being obnoxious in a hilarious way and an insufferable one. Thankfully, in Curtis’ capable hands, she is overwhelmingly the former. It’s easy to see how much of a blast she’s having chewing the scenery as the arrogant, nosy antagonist. Many of the show’s best scenes are between her and her unexpected, impossible-to-define relationship with Arvid. O'Neill also pulls off a challenging role that runs the risk of feeling eccentric and quirky for the sake of it, fully committing to the lovable odd duck of a character and winning hearts in the process.
‘Newlyweds’ Isn’t a Masterpiece Yet, But It Has the Potential to Be
Beyond the cast, there are some genuinely great moments of writing, with the show at its strongest when it leans into the stranger, more specific scenarios like the rock climbing scene or the pickleball episode. Physical comedy is something of a lost art nowadays — one that Newlyweds enthusiastically brings back and executes well.
Unfortunately, some of the humor falls flat, mostly because the stakes feel low. The comedy is broad but not heightened, which puts it in a strange middle area. While James and Jeanie are opposites and have their quirks, they are both overwhelmingly rational and calm people for the most part, and any disagreement they have is brushed off too quickly and easily. Leoni and Daly frequently choose to laugh at the things around them in character instead of playing it straight with more of a dramatic bend, which can ruin the immersion. The show seems afraid to go too sharp with its digs or take too many risks with its conflict, pulling its punches for fear of characters being too unlikable, and it suffers because of it.
The series hasn’t yet mastered its pacing either. There’s an undeniable rhythm that comes with an established comedy that Newlyweds is still searching for, making transitions from scene-to-scene — and sometimes even joke-to-joke — feel choppy. The show is lacking a certain confidence in what it’s supposed to sound like and be. It has a solid premise and a vague idea of what it is, but it needs more honing and refining to discover its identity and special sauce.
Despite some rocky elements, Newlyweds has undeniable potential. It’s a good show as it is, but with a little tweaking and time to find its footing, it could be truly great. The premise is intriguing, the tone is a welcome change in today’s television landscape, and the performances show promise. It has all of the necessary ingredients to be a smash hit — it just needs to land on the perfect recipe for them.
- Release Date
- October 23, 2026
- Network
- NBC
- Showrunner
- Bruce Helford
- Directors
- Pamela Fryman
- Writers
- Jamie Lee Curtis, Gail Lerner
Cast
-
Tea Leoni
Jeanie
-
Tim Daly
James
- Creator(s)
- Gail Lerner, Jamie Lee Curtis
Pros & Cons
- The multi-cam format and focus on physical comedy give it a welcome throwback feel.
- The performances are great across the board, from veterans to new talent.
- The premise is intriguing, with the legs and potential to be a new classic.
- The humor isn?t sharp or specific enough yet.
- The lack of conflict and stakes makes it difficult to get completely invested.
- The show is still ironing out its comedic rhythm and pacing.
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