Premiering on TBS on the 11th, with the pilot and an episode “The Hotel”: the comedy series The Detour:
The principals: Jason Jones as Nate (the father), Natalie Zea as Robin (the mother), Ashley Gerasimovich as Delilah (the daughter), Liam Carroll as Jared (the son)
This posting is triggered by the character Jared, thanks to his voicing the question (in the pilot episode), “Why are we in Penisylvania?”
Jared is a Snickerboy, primed to find “dirty words” (like penis) and allusions to sex everywhere, and eager to snicker loudly over his findings. It’s a stage in American male development — I can’t speak for other times and places — that comes after simple gross-out humor (boogers and peeing and all that) and before beginning to come to terms with something resembling the realities of sex and girls. In the hormonal rush of middle school. Roughly 10 through 14, with the Terrible Twelves in the middle.
Very brief account of the sitcom, from Wikipedia:
The Detour is an American comedy television series created by Jason Jones and Samantha Bee for TBS about a family vacation road trip. The series premiered on April 11, 2016.
The show has the family traveling by car (not by desire or plan) from upstate New York to Ft. Lauderdale FL The Rotten Tomatoes consensus is positive: “Sometimes raunchy, but often honest and endearing.”
Definitely raunchy; the show is not for the, as I say here, sexually modest. And all over the map in tone, but well-directed and edited, snappily acted, and often touching.
In the pilot episode, prompted by Delilah’s unexpectedly having her first period, on the road, the parents discover their kids’ extraordinary ignorance about sex (what they have is amazing preposterous tales that they have picked up from kids at school) and undertake to explain penis in vagina, and also how good it feels.
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