‘Newlyweds’ Review: Téa Leoni and Tim Daly in an Old-School NBC Sitcom

Although premiering as part of NBC’s fall lineup for the 2026-2027 season, the network’s new sitcom Newlyweds would have been a perfect mid-season replacement to fill the must-watch 9:30 TV slot in the late 90s, an innocuous replacement instead of reruns of Wings Or The naked truth.

Note: If parts of this sentence – “mid-season,”Wings” “The naked truth“, “NBC” — you were strangers, you are probably not the target audience of Newlywedsa decidedly old-fashioned comedy that harkens back to the days when comedies were comedies and you knew they were comedies because the studio audience told you when to burst out laughing.

Those were the days! Yes, this is another control reference aimed at differentiating the target audience from Newlyweds and a hip, modern audience that thinks a “comedy” is a show that makes you squirm in discomfort or makes you deeply invested in whether or not a fine restaurant gets a Michelin star.

At its absolute best, Newlyweds is low-impact comfort food, a totally forgettable but generally harmless opportunity to watch real-life spouses Tea Leoni and Tim Daly being sweet and horny together, and a show enjoyable enough for viewers who think better NBC comedies like St-Denis Medical And The fall and rise of Reggie Dinkins are too angry. These people deserve sitcoms too.

Co-created by Gail Lerner, who was recently fired from the series due to “creative differences” – “creative” not being a word that will be reused in this review – Newlyweds centers on Jeanie (Leoni) and James (Daly), who go out on a blind date and decide that life is too short for an elaborate courtship. So they get married almost immediately and build a relationship from there.

She is a middle school teacher and a widow with a daughter (Emma Meisel’s Poppy) and an adopted son (Ignacio Diaz-Silverio’s Lolo).

He’s a philosophy professor with an ever-present ex-wife (Jamie co-creator Lee Curtis’ Claudia) and a book he’ll never finish.

She’s a bit of a free spirit, although that’s not exactly how she was written, nor how Leoni plays the role. He’s a little angsty and uptight, although that’s not exactly how he was written, nor how Daly plays the role. Let’s just say they’re slightly different people.

Will they be able to make this conventionally unconventional relationship work?

This is a question the show doesn’t really want viewers to invest in. Newlyweds has the lowest stakes of any TV show I’ve ever watched, which is absolutely a feature and not a bug.

These are two characters approaching retirement age with pretty much zero anxiety. Once they decide to get together, their biggest source of adversity, through the three episodes sent to critics, is whether they will live in her very nice house or hers, which is not as nice because she doesn’t have a pool house. Oh, and there’s also controversy over whether they’ll be able to have their dream honeymoon in Paris, Budapest, and Tokyo, not because of financial difficulties but because they’re getting married in the middle of the school year and she doesn’t want to wait.

I guess future episodes will explain how a philosophy professor with an ex-wife whose work isn’t mentioned or isn’t relevant can afford both a relative mansion and the beach house where Claudia lives.

I suspect future episodes will allow her to briefly express her sadness over her husband’s death and allow her to explain why he describes Claudia as “terrifying” when she seems, at worst, curious.

The most emotion anyone on the show expresses is Poppy, whose tearful reaction to a breakup with a boyfriend who wasn’t mentioned once before or after the split is played for laughs and – all credit to Meisel – actually gets a laugh or two.

But the fact is that Newlyweds is a completely frictionless show by design – so frictionless that to add a touch of comic irritation, Claudia is constantly there and, because that’s not enough, the series has to feature an Arvid (Bill O’Neill). What is an Arvid? He is a Norwegian teaching assistant assigned to James during his month-long teaching position in Oslo as part of the pilot project. He then decided to move to Los Angeles to work with James in the United States. Work on what? Who cares? The only thing that matters is that Arvid falls a lot, speaks with a funny accent, and is equipped with the greatest repertoire of Scandinavian oddities since Rose Nylund regaled her best friends with stories of life at St. Olaf.

The studio audience for Newlyweds loves Arvid and laughs at his falls, his herring, and the fact that his nickname is “Milky” because he’s pale – which, to me, seems more observationally accurate than funny, but the studio audience disagreed.

The studio audience loves Arvid. They like Newlyweds and respond to each beat.

How, for example, would anyone know that Curtis was an Emmy- and Oscar-winning national treasure if audiences didn’t applaud his first appearance in every episode? (Shame on poor Daly and Leoni, stars of hundreds of much-loved episodes of television, but who don’t deserve applause.)

And how, for example, would anyone know it was sweet that Jeanie and James were affectionate if the audience didn’t hoot every time they kissed?

Newlyweds doesn’t need to pat itself on the back for how retro its charms are. The public regularly offers this approval.

It’s worth recognizing Newlyweds obviously plays everything in the middle, but it could be a lot worse. Yes, the show veers toward a lot of sitcom tropes, from the mean ex-wife to the wacky friends (Arvid is joined by Al Madrigal as Dan, who set up Jeanie and James’s date but seems to have no part of his own) to the predictability of an ever-short-lived marital disconnect. But there are countless hacked leads that have not been exploited. Again. The kids are Gen Z, but no one mentioned their pronouns or, really, any of the things that lazy sitcom writers tend to ascribe to young people. The main couple is old, but no one has made a Viagra joke yet.

It is, for now, a show that rolls and, from the start, rolls with easy confidence. Multicam directing icon Pamela Fryman (how I Met Your Mother) sets that tone at the start of a pilot that wades through lots of exposition without feeling as cumbersome and mind-numbing as a fully-exposed comedy pilot like that of the CBS vampire comedy, Eternally yours.

Leoni and Daly have solid comedic chemistry, but none of the occasional warmth they brought Madam Secretary. The writing is probably the biggest problem; so far, a lot of effort has gone into having James and Jeanie frequently repeat the differences between their characters – she’s a butterfly, he’s a gopher and you’ll learn what that means in the first 10 minutes of the pilot or you probably won’t care – and then talk about the sex they have, which is all you can do in prime time on NBC. Parents shouldn’t worry about watching Newlyweds with their children, who will not stay long enough for the first mating anyway.

Although Leoni and Daly are the stars here, most of my scattered laughs came from the young actors, all of whom are very good. Diaz-Silverio, who was generally expected to be the straight man in Freevee’s short-lived and vastly superior Firstis able to land several likeable punchlines despite playing a character that has been described – he was Jeanie’s student and he was in the foster care system and she adopted him – but not developed. Meisel, who I remember fondly from her supporting role in Disney’s Doogie Kamealoha, MDmakes for laughs despite, once again, playing a character with no demonstrable written personality. And if Diaz-Silverio and Meisel don’t have much to do, that’s only because O’Neill’s Arvid has been assigned all of the show’s comedic activities, which he performs with frightening enthusiasm.

Curtis makes it seem like she’s just happy to be as adored as she is by the crowd and she plays exclusively with them – whether Claudia is bragging about her breasts, tormenting Jeanie, who she mistakes for James’ maid, or even speaking Norwegian just for fun.

Television has no shortage of comedies that deliver biting satire and compelling commentary – which are, in fact, so fixated on commentary that no one even bothers to include jokes. Newlyweds has no bite and its fingers are nowhere near a cultural pulse, but it’s clear and broad and lets you pretend it’s 1998 again.