Look Who's Grown-ish up

black-ish has been one of the funniest, sharpest and most politically aware comedies on any network. So the idea for a spin-off would appear to be fairly natural. In May of 2017, ABC floated one dealing with the eldest daughter Zoey (Yara Shahdi) going off to college, and choosing a fairly big one not far from her house in LA. The episode was pleasing enough to merit an independent launch, but then for various reasons it got pushed over to Freeform, an ABC satellite network. Given everything weighted against it, one would wonder if that meant the network was hedging its bets. But Freeform (which was once ABC Family) has always been a network willing to experiment with some fairly daring teen based series. Their most famous one was Pretty Little Liars, but they've also had some fairly original series, most notably Greek and Bunheads, both killed too soon.

And grown-ish manages, most of the time, to have its cake and eat it too.  Throughout her three and a half season stint on black-ish, Zoey seemed the most together of the Johnson children. But as she finds herself going to college, its become increasingly clear that she's been dropping the fall. Her very first action at a college party was to ditch one of the few people she automatically befriended, Ana, causing her to humiliate herself in front of the student body. The ramifications have hit in a couple of ways - first she ended up having her as a roommate, and now she seems to have enrolled in a course that deals primarily with the running of drones that seems to be from midnight to 2 AM. This is actually even funnier than it sounds, because for some reason this is course is being taught by Charlie (Deon Cole) who worked at Dre's office, and always seemed to be the most clueless person there. (Just as in black-ish, he has the ability to steal every scene he's in.) More to the point, she seems to have made friends with an even more outsider group than you'd expect from a collefe like this: Jzlyn and Skyler (Chloe and Halle Bailey) twin athletes trying to keep up their image for their marketing,  Vivek,  an Indian studying to be an engineer who seems to be the campus drug dealer, Nomi, the school bisexual afraid to come out to her family, and Cash, the student activist, who would seem to be a poster child for everything that's wrong with school, but has more layers than usual/.

grown-ish, despite bearing most of the writing staff that brought black-ish on to the big screen, has not yet emerged as fully brilliant as its parent sitcom. Zoey still narrates much of the action, but she overtly breaks the fourth wall, as opposed to Dre's more subtle narration. And it still hasn't quite managed to utilize all of its large cast nearly as well. (They don't seem to have quite figured out how to use Chris Parnell as the Dean of students, which is odd, considering Nomi is his niece. But every so often, you can her the 'ping' of genuine crystal that you heard so frequently on black-ish. The second episode was actually considerably better than the pilot, as it mainly dealt with a very really problem, drug use on campus. Zoey had been reluctant to get involved with this, until she needed help getting through a paper on Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who she thought was Judge Judy). She was reluctant to use Adderal (even though she though her younger brother and her father should probably both be on it), until it came time to wok on her paper. She also spent half the episode trying to track down her crush (who she admitting she was stalking) and by the end up the episode she decided to give both up - until the same crush texted her and four in the morning, causing her to take a pill.

grown-ish is  a fun show, and as a bonus for being on basic cable, the kids can actually swear like college kids (almost, some of the more extensive ones are bleeped out), and it doesn't lean that extensively on its parent sitcom, though that may be more about distance than anything else. I hope that the good people at Freeform give this series a fair chance to, like its heroine, get to the head of the class.

My score: 3.75 stars.