It hasn’t even got a title yet–they’re still calling it The Rob Schneider Comedy–but it’s been on the pilot-show radar for months. Now, after months of dithering at two pilots, CBS has ordered the three-camera sitcom as a midseason replacement.
The network has made plenty of changes along the way, but the basic premise has remain the same: Schneider plays a close version of himself, a “confirmed bachelor” who falls in love and marries a beautiful Latina, and suddenly finds himself part of a tight-knit Mexican-American family. Like so many shows before it, it’s based–loosely–on the star’s own life and his marriage to his current wife and her family.
The show has been through some serious retooling. The first pilot starred Tony Plana as the patriarch; the second time around Cheech Marin was sitting in the father’s chair. Other actors were replaced as well, including Nadine Velazquez who was set to star as Schneider’s wife, and Ada Maris, who was set to play the mother-in-law. Now Spanish (as in Spain) actress Claudia Bassols has the wifely role, and Diana Maria Riva, most recently seen as the captain on FOX’s The Good Guys, will be stepping into the M-I-L position. In fact, only Eugenio Derbez as Bassols’ uncle and Lupe Ontiveros as the abuelita made it from the first pilot to the second–and hopefully, onto the air. Ricky Rico has also joined the cast.
The casting of Riva–a terrific actress in comedy and drama–is a little puzzling. Riva is only 42 (and gorgeous); she’ll be playing the wife of Cheech Marin, 65 (Nash Bridges was fifteen years ago, folks, and Cheech and Chong…well, way before that.) Schneider himself is pushing 50 (48, actually), which makes him demonstrably older than his ‘mother-in-law, and–pretty obviously–more than fifteen years older than his TV wife Bassols, 32 (voted the Sexiest Woman in Spain last year by Esquire Magazine. Rob is no fool.)
Bassols is also virtually unknown in the United States; one of her first English-language acting jobs is a starring role in the next direct-to-DVD Jean Claude Van Damme movie (written and directed by JCvD himself), The Eagle Path, which won’t be available until October 3, and a thriller called Emulsion has no release date. There may be some grumbling about the casting of a European to play a role that seems to the daughter of a Mexican-American family who was born and raised in the U.S.
There are other concerns about the show potential treatment of Latinos. In the past, Schneider’s comedy has been anything but subtle, and his portrayal of racial or cultural stereotypes, though always affectionate, has been broad to say the least, like his Islander caricature in 50 First Dates, his Italian Delivery Man in Mr. Deeds, and his Asian Minister in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, not to mention a wide range of equally larger-than-life interpretations during his years on Saturday Night Live. It will be interesting, at the very least, to see how sensitive or sweet the final portrayal of the Latino family is going to be. We’ve seen both hits and misses in recent years (e.g., Ugly Betty in one direction, and Outsourced in the other.)
We’ll all get a chance to see how it plays when the program–presumably with a catchier title–hits the air in early 2012.
