I'm still struggling with the title of this series. When it comes to single women in the dating scene, a man is considered a unicorn if he is a widow and a single father. He's not divorced. He's monogamous. He's a devoted dad. He's not having a midlife crisis. He's not into women half his age simply for the lust of it. Particularly, women are into him because his wife died. It's akin to pity dates. It's weird though because the characters and thus the writers of this show, Bill Martin, Mike Schiff and Grady Cooper, treat this concept as if it's some rare thing. Perhaps, in the actual dating world, it's rare, though men under the age of 50 who are widowed aren't something to be wished for more. It would mean more women dying young. The likelihood would be that men over the age of 50 and who are upper middle-aged or elderly fit more into this so-called "unicorn" status, but it seems the writers here want to keep the appeal to Generation X and possibly Generation Y, and not the Baby Boomers, which is typical of CBS' demographic.
Speaking of Baby Boomers though, this unicorn idea has been seen on TV before. Both
The Andy Griffifth Show (1960) and
My Three Sons (1960) were about widowed fathers. I never watched
My Three Sons, but
The Andy Griffith Show did deal with the widowed father's dating life to some degree. There have since been plenty of shows that have incorporated single dads. The dads being widowed is the rarer thing, particularly in comedies or sitcoms, but we have had these unicorns in
Full House (1987) and
Arrested Development (2003). This series is no where near as funny or as engaging as those shows. Those aforementioned programs had other things than just widowed fathers dating again and particularly the supporting casts in those other shows had other things happening. Here, the only thing is the widowed father dating, which is something that loses steam rather quickly.
Walton Goggins (
Justified and
The Shield) stars as Wade Felton, a soccer coach whose wife just died a year ago. He has two teenage daughters. His friends encourage him to create an online profile on a dating app. Because he has this alleged unicorn status, he gets a lot of responses. A lot of the comedy comes from the women being clear mismatches or Wade not understanding social media or how to behave in the current, Internet culture, mostly because he's too nice and polite, leaning passive, whereas Internet culture is aggressive and constantly in-your-face. It's a bit odd though because it seems initially that Wade is dating women younger than him, probably by a decade or so.
The show will probably build to Wade dating someone his own age and probably a female unicorn or a woman who has been widowed with children. Then the series can become a version of
The Brady Bunch. Otherwise, watching him go on random dates doesn't seem as appealing unless he decided to come out late in life as bisexual or something.
What doesn't help is the supporting cast here that feels really wasted. Wade has two married couples who are his friends. A black couple and a white couple. All I can really tell you about them is that his white female friend is Delia and she's a pediatrician. His black female friend is Meg and she has a sister who's good with social media. Other than that, not much about them is established. Obviously, future episodes can develop them further, but it's great if those characters can feel somewhat or at least more developed than they do in the first, two episodes. What doesn't help in the first, two episodes is the friends talking about nothing else, except for Wade's love life. It's as if they don't have lives of their own, which might be the point of married friends sometimes, but it just makes things boring and one-note when Wade's dating life is all they talk about.
Rated TV-PG-DL.
Running Time: 30 mins.
Thursdays at 8:30PM on CBS.
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