‘Newlyweds’ Review: Téa Leoni and Tim Daly in an Innocuously Bland NBC Sitcom That’s Straight Out of the Late ’90s

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Although it’s premiering as part of NBC’s fall lineup for the 2026-27 season, the network’s new sitcom Newlyweds would have been a perfect midseason replacement to occupy the 9:30 Must See TV slot in the late ’90s, an innocuous fill-in instead of reruns of Wings or The Naked Truth.

Note: If some parts of that sentence — “midseason,” “Wings,” “The Naked Truth,” “NBC” — were foreign to you, you probably are not the target audience for Newlyweds, a resolutely 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 roar with laughter.

Those were the days! Yes, that’s another gatekeeping reference aimed to differentiate between the target audience for Newlyweds and a hip, modern audience that thinks a “comedy” is a show that makes you squirm with discomfort or invest deeply in whether or not a fine dining restaurant secures a Michelin star.

At its absolute best, Newlyweds is low-impact comfort food, a wholly forgettable but generally inoffensive opportunity to watch real-life spouses Tea Leoni and Tim Daly being sweet and horny together, and an agreeable enough show for viewers who think better NBC comedies like St. Denis Medical and The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins are too edgy. Those people deserve sitcoms, too.

Co-created by Gail Lerner, who recently was fired from the series due to “creative differences” — “creative” not being a word that will be used again in this review — Newlyweds focuses 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’s a middle school teacher and widow with a daughter (Emma Meisel’s Poppy) and adopted son (Ignacio Diaz-Silverio’s Lolo).

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

She’s a little bit free-spirited, though that’s not exactly how she’s been written, nor is it how Leoni is playing the part. He’s a little bit anxious and buttoned-up, though that’s not exactly how he’s been written, nor is it how Daly is playing the part. Let’s just say they’re slightly different kinds of people.

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

It’s a question the show doesn’t really want viewers investing in. It’s possible that 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 who are nearing retirement age with approximately zero anxiety. Once they decide to get together, their biggest source of adversity, through the three episodes sent to critics, is whether they’ll live in his extremely nice home or hers, which isn’t as nice because it doesn’t have a pool house. Oh, and there’s also some dispute over whether they’ll be able to have their dream honeymoon in Paris, Budapest and Tokyo, not because of financial difficulties but because they get married in the middle of the school year and she doesn’t want to wait.

I’m assuming future episodes will explain how a philosophy professor with an ex-wife whose job either isn’t mentioned or isn’t relevant is able to afford both a relative mansion and the beach house where Claudia lives.

I’m assuming future episodes will let her briefly express sadness about the death of her husband and will let him explain why he describes Claudia as “terrifying” when she seems, at worst, nosy.

The most emotion that anybody in the series expresses is Poppy, whose tear-filled reaction to a break-up with a boyfriend who wasn’t mentioned a single time before or after the split is played for laughs and — all credit to Meisel — actually gets a chuckle or two.

The point, though, is that Newlyweds is a wholly friction-free show by design — so frictionless that in order to add a jolt of comic irritation, Claudia is constantly around and, because that isn’t enough, the show has to introduce an Arvid (Bill O’Neill). What’s an Arvid? He’s a Norwegian teaching assistant assigned to James during the latter’s one-month teaching position in Oslo in the pilot. Then he decides to move to Los Angeles to work with James in the States. Work on what? Who cares? The only things that matter are that Arvid falls down a lot, speaks with a funny accent and comes equipped with the largest repertoire of Scandinavian quirks since Rose Nylund regaled her best friends with stories of life in St. Olaf.

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

The studio audience loves Arvid. They love Newlyweds and respond to every beat.

How, for example, would anybody know that Curtis was an Emmy- and Oscar-winning national treasure if the audience didn’t applaud her first appearance in every episode? (Pity poor Daly and Leoni, stars of hundreds of episodes of well-regarded television, but not worthy of scene-entering applause.)

And how, for example, would anybody know that it’s sweet that Jeanie and James are affectionate if the audience didn’t hoot whenever they kiss?

Newlyweds doesn’t need to be self-congratulatory about how retro its charms are. The audience offers that approval regularly.

It’s worth acknowledging that Newlyweds plays everything conspicuously down-the-middle, but it could be far, far worse. Yes, the show steers into a large number of sitcom tropes, from the wicked ex-wife to the wacky friends (Arvid is joined by Al Madrigal as Dan, who set Jeanie and James up on their date but seems to have no part of his own) to the predictability of ever-short-lived spousal disconnect. But there are countless hacky avenues that haven’t been tapped. Yet. The kids are Gen Z, but nobody has mentioned their pronouns or, really, any of the things lazy sitcom writers tend to ascribe to young people. The main couple is old, but somehow nobody has made a Viagra joke yet.

This is, for now, a show that coasts and, from the beginning, coasts with an easy confidence. Multicam directing icon Pamela Fryman (How I Met Your Mother) sets that tone early in a pilot that races through a lot of exposition without feeling as cumbersome and stultifying as an all-exposition comedy pilot like that of CBS’ vampire comedy, Eternally Yours.

Leoni and Daly have solid comic chemistry, but none of the occasional heat they brought to Madam Secretary. The writing is probably the biggest problem there; so far much effort has been put into having James and Jeanie frequently repeat the ways their characters are different — 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 talking about the sex they’re having, which is all you can do in primetime on NBC. Parents should have no concerns about watching Newlyweds with their children, who won’t stick around long enough for the first coupling anyway.

While Leoni and Daly are the stars here, most of my scattered laughs came from the young actors, all really good. Diaz-Silverio, who generally had to be the straight man in Freevee’s short-lived and vastly superior Primo, is able to land several likable punchlines despite playing a character who has been described — he was Jeanie’s student and he was in the foster care system and she adopted him — but not developed. Meisel, whom I actually remember fondly from a supporting role on Disney’s Doogie Kameāloha, M.D., gets chuckles despite, again, playing a character with no demonstrable written personality. And if Diaz-Silverio and Meisel are given little to do, it’s only because O’Neill’s Arvid has been given all of the show’s comedic business, which he plays with creepy enthusiasm.

Curtis gives the impression that she’s just happy to be as adored as she is by the crowd and she plays to them exclusively — whether Claudia is boasting about her breasts, tormenting Jeanie, whom she confuses with James’ maid, or even speaking Norwegian just for kicks.

Television doesn’t lack for comedies that deliver biting satire and cogent commentary — that are, in fact, so committed to commentary that nobody bothers to even include jokes. Newlyweds has no bite and its fingers are nowhere near a cultural pulse, but it’s bright and broad and lets you pretend that it’s 1998 again.