My Boys: The Complete First Season (review)

Two steps forward, one step back: It’s refreshing to see a TV series depicting men and women as genuine friends and not merely faking it as a pretext to getting into one another’s pants. But why does it have to pretend that Chicago sportswriter P.J. (Jordana Spiro: Must Love Dogs) is such an oddball among women? These 22 episodes, the entire first season of the first original scripted show from cable network TBS, draws all of its humor from how “funny” and “unusual” it is that P.J. likes to drink beer and play poker with her gang of guy pals, that she thinks in baseball metaphors, that her approach to love and sex is stereotypically “male” (until it isn’t). Poor P.J., who is such an anomaly of her gender that the best she can do for a female pal is extreme girly-girl Stephanie (Kellee Stewart), whose greatest ambition in life is, apparently, to get P.J. to wear makeup -- there would be no reason for these two to even look at each other, never mind be “friends,” if the show acknowledged that P.J. is nowhere near the freak of nature it makes her out to be. Then again, P.J. isn’t a real woman at all: she’s a guy’s fantasy of one kind of ideal woman. Those guys may get a kick out of this sitcom: everyone else can give it a pass. Extras include a behind-the-scenes featurette, bloopers, a sports montage, outtakes, and more.