The lovely, funny โAmerican Classic,โ premiering Sunday on MGM+, is a love letter to theater, community and community theater. Kevin Kline plays Richard Bean, a narcissistic stage actor. Heโs famous enough to be opening on Broadway in โKing Lear,โ but he has to be pushed onstage and is forgetting lines. After he drunkenly assails a hostile New York Times critic โ caught on video, of course โ heโs suspended from the play, and his agent (Tony Shalhoub) advises him to get out of town and lay low until the heatโs off, as they used to say in the gangster movies.
Learning that his mother (Jane Alexander, acting royalty, in film clips) has died, Richard heads back to his small Pennsylvania hometown, where his family โ all actors, like the Barrymores, but no longer acting โ owns a once-celebrated theater. To Richardโs horror, it has, for want of income, become a dinner theater, hosting touring productions of โNunsenseโ and โForever Plaidโ instead of the great stage works on which he cut his teeth.
Brother Jon (Jon Tenney), running the kitchen at the theater, is married to Kristen (Laura Linney), Richardโs onetime acting partner, who dated him before her marriage; now sheโs the mayor. Their teenage daughter, Miranda (Nell Verlaque) โ a name from Shakespeare โ does want to act and move to New York, as her mother had before her, but is afraid to tell her parents. Richardโs father, Linus (Len Cariou), is suffering from dementia, though not to the point he wonโt actively contribute to the action; every day he comes out again as gay.
Across the eight-episode series, things move from the ridiculous to the sublime. Richardโs attempt to stage his motherโs funeral, with her coffin being lowered from the ceiling, while โAlso sprach Zarathustraโ plays and smoke billows toward the audience, fortunately comes to naught; but he announces at the ceremony that heโll direct a production of Thornton Wilderโs 1938 play โOur Townโ at the theater, to โrestore the soul of this town.โ (His big idea is to ignore Wilderโs stage directions, which ask for no curtain, no set and few props, with a โrealistic version,โ featuring a working soda fountain, rain effects and a horse.) Fate will have other plans for this, and not to give away what in any case should be obvious, the title of the play will also become its ethos, with a cast of amateurs, including Mirandaโs jealous boyfriend, Randall (Ajay Friese), and ordinary people standing in for the ordinary people of Wilderโs Groverโs Corners.
The series has a comfortable, cushiony feeling; itโs the sort of show that could have been made as a film in the 1990s, and in which Kline could have starred as easily in his 40s as in his 70s; it has the same relation to reality as โDave,โ in which he played a good-hearted ordinary Joe who takes the place of a lookalike U.S. president. The town is essentially a sunny place, full of mostly sunny people, to all appearances, a typical comedy hamlet. But weโre told itโs distressed, and Mayor Kristen is in transactional cahoots with developer Connor Boyle (Billy Carter), who wants clearance to build a casino on the site of a landmark hotel. (Much of the plot is driven by money โ needing it, trading for it, leaving it, losing it.) He also wants his heavily accented, bombshell Russian girlfriend, Nadia (Elise Kibler), to have a part in โOur Town.โ
As in the great Canadian comedy โSlings & Arrows,โ set at a Shakespeare Festival outside of Toronto, themes and moments and speeches from the play being performed are echoed in the lives of the performers, while the viewer experiences the double magic of watching a fine actor playing an actor playing a part. Kline, of course, is himself an American classic, with a long stage and screen career that encompasses classical drama, romantic and musical comedy and cartoon voiceovers; the series makes room for Richard to perform soliloquies from โHamletโ and โHenry V,โ parts Klein has played onstage. He brings out the sweetness latent in Richard. Linney, who played against her sweetheart image in โOzark,โ is happily back on less deadly ground (though sheโs tense and drinks a little). Tenney, who was sweet and funny on โThe Closer,โ and who we donโt see enough of these days, is sweeter and funnier here, and gets to sing. (All the Beans will sing, except for Linus.)
As a comedy, it is often predicable โ you know that things will work out, and some major plot points are as good as inevitable โ but itโs the good sort of predictability, where you get what you came for, where you hear the words you want to hear, ones you could never have written yourself. โAmerican Classicโ is not out to challenge your world view in any way but wants only to confirm your feelings and in doing so amplify them. Shock effects are fine in their place โ and to be sure there are major twists in the plot โ but there is a certain release when the thing youโre ready to have happen, happens, whether it brings laughter or tears. Either is welcome.