Compliments For "Fisher"

I'm going to miss "Growing Up Fisher," that warm-hearted sitcom about a kid growing up with a blind father and a childlike mother, even if the show wasn't perfect.  Because even though Jenna Elfman wasn't bad as the childlike mother, that doesn't change the fact that it was still Jenna Elfman.  I suspect, though, that the primary reason the show couldn't find enough viewers to satisfy NBC was because people were no less uncomfortable watching J.K. Simmons play a blind lawyer any more than they were watching Michael J. Fox as a TV reporter with Parkinson's disease in his now-gone namesake sitcom.  And unlike Fox really having Parkinson's disease, Simmons isn't actually blind.  I only hope he has something other than his Farmers Insurance commercials to hang his hat on going forward. 

For the few of you who appreciate "Growing Up Fisher," though, you're in luck with regard to the two remaining unaired episodes of the sitcom.  NBC is airing them next Wednesday (June 11), back-to-back starting at 8 PM Eastern.  The series finale has the entire Fisher family going on vacation together, despite the fact that the parents are divorced, so I assume it will end on an upbeat note, at least.  I'll be watching.  It's a small consolation, I guess, but it beats what happened to two of CBS's failed sitcoms, "Bad Teacher" and the awful "Friends With Better Lives." The Big Eye dropped plans to "burn off" unaired episodes of those turkeys after realizing that no one had watched these shows before, so who would watch the remaining episodes?   Kudos to NBC for taking a chance on sitcoms dealing with disabilities and finding the warmth and joy beneath, even if the experiment failed twice.