Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Million Little Things’ On ABC, Where Three Guys Figure Out Friendship After A Suicide

It’s surprising that networks have taken a couple of years to make their own versions of This Is Us and capitalize on the show’s Emmy-winning success. But let the onslaught of cry-TV begin: ABC gives us A Million Little Things, which lays out its central question right from the opening scene. Will it make you cry with sadness or frustration?

A MILLION LITTLE THINGS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A montage where we see a successful developer close a long-in-the works deal as he walks out on the balcony of his Boston office, a man who’s talking to his mistress about finally leaving his wife, another man who anxiously waits to see if his breast cancer is back while his doctor makes a lunch order, and a man who goes to swallow a handful of pills but needs to wait for the water to filter first.

The Gist: The developer is Jonathan Dixon (Ron Livingston), who seems to be happy and smiling as he makes this real estate deal. He leaves his phone and a blue envelope on a table on the balcony. Then his assistant Ashley (Christina Ochoa) walks in right after Jonathan jumps off the balcony, landing on a car below.

Jon’s suicide is a mystery to his closest friends, who all met in a stuck elevator ten years ago and bonded over the Bruins; Jon vowed that they’d go to every home game together from there on out, and they’ve stuck to that pact. As far as they knew, Jon was a happy guy who always wanted to make every day count, as we see in footage from the elevator, post-game bar visits and more.

Rome Howard (Romany Malco) spit the pills out when he got the call about Jon; he’s a filmmaker who is stuck doing commercials because they pay the bills. Though he has a seemingly idyllic life with his wife Regina (Christina Marie Moses) he suffers from bouts of depression. Eddie Saville (David Giuntoli) is a former rock star who quit the rock lifestyle to get off drugs and booze, but now he feels stifled in his marriage to his hard-driving lawyer wife Katherine (Grace Park). Gary Mendez (James Roday) is still trying to emotionally recover from his bout with breast cancer, but it doesn’t curb his wandering eye; he picks up a woman named Maggie Bloom (Allison Miller) in a breast cancer support group, then brings her to Jon’s funeral.

There, Maggie bonds with Regina and Jon’s wife Delilah (Stephanie Szostak). Delilah has her own issues, as we see in the episode’s big twist. But for now, she’s trying to process Jon’s death just like everyone else.

Our Take: A Million Little Things is a head-scratcher of a show. Created by DJ Nash (‘Til Death, Bent, Growing Up Fisher), it’s ABC’s stab at a multi-layered, flashback-laden, grab-the-Kleenex show like This Is Us. And it’s also supposed to explore how men bond and form friendships beyond just sports, beer and comparing charcoal to gas. All of it is supposed to be wrapped in a sense of humor. But everything about the pilot just felt… off.

Don’t get us wrong — the cast is stellar. Psych fanatics will find Roday only slightly less zany here as Gary; Malco and Giuntoli are both charming as hell in their respective roles. And Moses, Szostak and Miller make a good team. But the situations they’re all in don’t make a lot of sense.

Why would Maggie, for instance, immediately be brought into this group with a decade of history simply because she went on the Worst Date Ever with Gary (a funeral? Really?)? Why is Katherine so much of a ball buster that Eddie wants out (she seems a bit… intense. But that’s no reason for cheating on her)? Why did Eddie and the person he was having the affair with think it was a good idea? And what’s in that blue envelope that’s so damning that Ashley wants to keep everyone in the dark about what it says?

The basis of the guys’ friendship is also a bit shaky: they were stuck in an elevator for a couple of hours, and go to hockey games. So what? But at least that’s addressed by speeches by Eddie at Jon’s funeral and Gary at the first Bruins game they go to without Jon. Do they really know each other? And what does friendship mean when you’re four guys who’ve already lived lives before any of you even met?

There’s enough there to keep watching, but the pilot puts the show on shaky ground right away.

Sex and Skin: Gary and Maggie do it in the bathroom after she meets him at the support group meeting; we also see a flashback where Eddie and the person he’s having an affair with are together post-coitus.

Parting Shot: A montage of Gary, Eddie and Rome coping with what comes next. Rome gets a text from Gary to go to his door, and he sees a framed print of the the selfie the three of them made at the game that evening.

Sleeper Star: Miller makes the most out of a role that makes little sense on the surface, considering she doesn’t know any of these people at the beginning of the episode and is part of the group by the end.

Most Pilot-y Line: After Maggie tells the group that people are often hiding what they’re really feeling to even those closest to them, Gary snidely says “Okee doke. Apparently Maggie here moonlights as an armchair psychologist.” Which is when she tells him that she works as a clinical psychologist specializing in depression. And yet, she still likes him.

Our Call: STREAM IT, but this is a tentative recommendation. The cast makes the show watchable, but Nash and his writing staff have to try really hard to get past the clumsy pilot.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Watch A Million Little Things on Hulu