Matt LeBlanc plays Adam, a Pittsburgh — by way of a Hollywood multicamera soundstage — contractor who takes on new familial responsibilities when his wife Andi (Liza Snyder) decides to return to work after 13 years raising their three children. Adam thinks he knows what it takes to balance parental duties and work, but it turns out that being a sporadically available “Daddy Fun Times” is very different from doing classroom chores and attempting to enforce discipline.Man with a Plan Season 1-4 Download. In Kevin Can Wait, CBS boiled Kevin James’ essence down to “essentially well-meaning man-child,” while Man With a Plan boils LeBlanc’s essence down to “essentially well-meaning dunderhead.”
Responsibilities get in the way of James’ character’s inability to be his wife’s fourth kid, at least initially, while responsibilities are simply too complicated for the LeBlanc character to intellectually comprehend, at least initially. In both cases, the characters are capable of in-episode understanding and, because their intentions are fundamentally benign, they can do the right thing, but they’re incapable of long-term growth, because if they turned their focus outward and aspired to permanent improvement, there wouldn’t be a show anymore. I’ll leave it for Friends fanatics to determine if what they liked about Joey was simply his combination of grounded goodness and grounded stupidity or if there was something more to the appeal of that character.
Certainly what was most effective about LeBlanc’s excellent work on Episodes was far more complicated than that, but there’s something about this reduction that plays differently when the LeBlanc persona is put in a supervisory capacity over little humans, which was never the case on Friends or Episodes. Here, he’s entitled to one brainwave per episode as redemption for 20-ish minutes of cluelessness that creators Jackie and Jeff Filgo (That ‘70s Show) find charming, but doesn’t play that way.“You know what it makes me realize? How little you were doing before,” Andi tells her husband after one of his little parenting victories and he replies with pride, rather than sheepishness, “Yeah, I was getting away with murder.”