letterten 2003-04 fall preview

debuts Wednesday, Oct 1, 8:30pm

premise from	Bobby and fiancee Liz get along great. Their parents? Not so much. Liz has two dads and Bobby's Boston family is of the old-fashioned Irsish Catholic variety. Even if they didn't have a thousand things to disagree about, Bobby's sister Maddy is always there to come up with something else. [ABC link]
stars	Lenny Clarke, Reid Scott, Maggie Lawson ("Nancy Drew") , John Benjamin Hickey ("The Job") , Harriet Harris ("Memento," "Frasier") , Chris Sieber
producers	Ann Flett-Giordano, Chuck Ranberg, Craig Zadan, Neil Meron
studio	Touchstone Television and Paramount Television

opinions
	Take "My Two Dads," "Dharma and Greg" and throw in a generous helping of "Queer Eye" and there's your premise. It'll be very easy to be lazy and overuse the very obvious stereotypes.
	We're fans of Clarke from his days on "The Job," and the rest of the cast is capable, but the coarse material in this variation on "The Birdcage" is beneath them. Seemingly every joke plays off the culture clash between Scott's working-class Catholic family and Lawson's upscale gay dads. The characters will need to be humanized a lot more for this show to work.

my thoughts on "It's All Relative"
	Probable full season. It's got a good hammock, but better help drive more viewers to "The Bachelor." Like all ABC sitcoms this year, with the exception of "8 Simple Rules...," it could be moved to see if a better fit (assuming this one doesn't work) is possible.