It’s a weird idea for Ryan Murphy to create a new sitcom about redefining what a family in 2012 should be. It’s like asking Aaron Sorkin to make a CW teen drama or having Lena Dunham create the next CSI: it just doesn’t add up. Murphy’s shows have featured outrageous twists to surprise the audience (Nip/Tuck, American Horror Story), however with Glee, he brought broad stereotypes together to create a de facto family in a show that had a surprising amount of warmth of its characters. But having Murphy on a comedy like The New Normal just doesn’t feel like a good mixture, as the show employs stereotypical characters and jokes made by a bigoted grandmother while also trying to be a sweet series about how abnormal is the new normal. The New Normal is a show that tries to have a big heart but nothing else to back it up.
The New Normal focuses mostly on Bryan, played by Andrew Rannells, a gay man who while going clothes-shopping sees an adorable child and decides that a child is what he needs to complete his wardrobe, essentially. There’s no other reason given as to why he would like a child other than that he could dress it up in little kid clothes. His partner is David, played by Justin Bartha, and the pairing is the classic sitcom pairing idea that opposites attract. While Bryan goes to Barney’s in L.A. and tries to dress like Mary Tyler Moore, David is fine with just lounging around on the couch watching football with his dog. David openly accepts Bryan’s request for a child, and so off they search for the right surrogate for their child.
Meanwhile in Ohio, single mom Goldie, a quirky Georgia King, catches her partner of nine years cheating on her after she had left their house for six minutes. Goldie’s grandmother, a harsh Ellen Barkin, seems to have no other purpose other than to spout off horrible things about other people different than her, while claiming to not be a bigot. She scoffs at a lesbian couple showing signs of affection and calls an Asian woman “Hello Kitty,” but then claims she’s progressive because she was the first of her friends to eat at a Chipotle—cause you know, that’s Mexican food. When Jane goes inside Goldie’s house to threaten her now-ex, Goldie and her daughter Shania decide to take their Nana’s car and drive as far away as they can. After three days, they end up in L.A., with no money and nothing to go off other than Goldie’s teenage desire that she wanted to be a lawyer before the birth of her daughter changed her life.
With David and Bryan ready to have a child, they go a playground to discuss their ideals of what a family should actually be. This leads to the episode’s worst moments, where the show tries to explain its mantra that being a different family is what is normal today. To illustrate this point, they show a woman who was too big of a whore to have kids when she was younger, but then had a ton when she was older that she can now hardly contain, and a little person who had worries about having a normal-sized daughter but decided against it. It’s not a horrible moment, until the mother drives her daughter, who is already taller than her, away from the playground in her Barbie car for children.