Entertainment, TV, Television - Army Times

‘My Boys’ begins its 2nd season

Some facets of life never require perfection.

That includes Cubs, commuting and dating. All happen to be part of “My Boys,” which opens its season Monday on TBS.

Ostensibly, this is a show about PJ Franklin, a sports writer covering the Chicago Cubs. Jordana Spiro is settling into the role.

The daughter of Manhattan art dealers, Spiro knew approximately nothing about baseball or the Cubs; now she can drop names like Alfonso Soriano and Carlos Zambrano into conversations. “My friends will just look at me and say, ‘What happened to you?’ ” she said.

Still, the baseball is mostly there for metaphors. This is a show about friendship and romance; PJ is good at half of that.

“She’s a really smart, centered person,” Spiro said. “But she’s also very complicated.”

PJ’s crowd includes exactly one female friend (Kellee Stewart), four male friends and her brother Andy (Jim Gaffigan). In guy fashion, PJ avoids digging too deep. “She does tend to stifle her emotions,” Spiro said.

That was complicated at the end of last season, when she slept with one of the guys. The new season starts with nervous glances. PJ’s world doesn’t do well with intimacy.

There’s one other change now: Andy bought a home in the suburbs. While the others have a casual, walking life, he’s usually in a traffic jam.

That’s realistic, said Gaffigan, who plays Andy. “Getting from O’Hare (Chicago’s airport) to anywhere is impossible,” he said. “You might as well take a helicopter.”

He’s always known the challenges of Chicago traffic. Gaffigan grew up in a small town near Gary, Ind., which is at the edge of Chicago. He was close to big-city life — sort of.

“As a teenager I was always saying, ‘Let’s go to Chicago,’ ” Gaffigan recalled. My friends would look at me like I was talking about a mythical place.”

He didn’t spend much time there, but he acquired key Chicago traits. That includes a fondness for the Cubs, with all that suggests (an easygoing, wait-until-next-year outlook). It also includes a low-key manner that works best for comedy. “He’s arguably one of the best stand-up comics in the country,” Spiro said.

Some of his routines — about cake and about the need to say “cut” in real-life situations — are classics. Gaffigan gets heavy play on comedy radio and on Comedy Central; he also fits perfectly into the Chicago tone of “My Boys.”

The show was created by Betsy Thomas, who is comfortable in guy situations. At one point, she was raised by her older brothers.

She was a Detroit Tiger fan, living in the same town (Franklin, Mich.) as Tiger great Al Kaline. Later, her husband converted her to the Cubs; now they live in Los Angeles, where they’ve had a weekly poker party for almost nine years.

That reality was adjusted slightly for “My Boys.” The poker game is still there; so are the Cubs and the girl-with-the-guys theme. Now it’s set in the cheery Wrigleyville neighborhood near the Cubs stadium.

“I love Chicago,” Spiro said. “You can walk around. It’s a pedestrian-friendly city.”

Gaffigan’s character doesn’t get to walk much anymore now that he has the house in the suburbs. That was presumably his wife’s idea. Andy has grumbled about the lady constantly. In a surprise last season, however, the gang finally met her and found her to be sweet and charming.

She was played by Jeannie Noth, Gaffigan’s real-life wife. They met in New York, married in 2003 and have two kids. “Betsy says, ‘How did you end up with a good-looking wife?’ ” Gaffigan recalled.

They look like opposites, which they are. “She has all the energy,” Gaffigan said. “I’m barely comatose.”

That state may have been ideal for his childhood surviving winters near Chicago and summers without a pennant.