{"id":471673,"date":"2026-05-28T17:55:15","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T17:55:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/471673\/"},"modified":"2026-05-28T17:55:15","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T17:55:15","slug":"would-you-watch-a-mr-mom-remake-starring-nate-bargatze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/471673\/","title":{"rendered":"Would You Watch a ‘Mr. Mom’ Remake Starring Nate Bargatze?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tNate Bargatze<\/a> is not a dumb guy. He<\/a> just<\/a> plays<\/a> one<\/a> on TV<\/a>. And, of course, onstage in his act, in which the 47-year-old comedian from Old Hickory, Tennessee, adopts the persona of a middle-aged everyschlub befuddled by modern life and expectations of basic competence. Nobody doggedly builds a stand-up career that takes them from clubs to theaters to selling out arena tours from a foundation of genuine stupidity. But you do get the sense that guy with the Southern drawl talking about his confusion over Starbucks orders and his daughter\u2019s common-core math lessons isn\u2019t that far from the IRL version. And because Bargatze is usually the butt of his own jokes, his mix of aw-shucks relatability and self-deprecation goes down nice and easy. An article<\/a> once compared his observational comedy to \u201cXanax chased by a cool glass of iced tea.\u201d Even that description sounds too edgy.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor early adopters who caught his specials before his 2023 SNL hosting-gig bump \u2014 we recommend 2019\u2019s The Tennessee Kid, which is still the best showcase for his slow-release timing \u2014 seeing Bargatze become the alpha dog of beta-male stand-up acts feels like justice has been served. It\u2019s not just that his act is family-friendly, or that he\u2019s offering neutral-ground escapism from our divisive world (\u201cThere\u2019s plenty of times you\u2019re going to be fighting,\u201d he told The New York Times<\/a>, \u201cso I can be the one hour you don\u2019t fight\u201d). It\u2019s that the dude is that freakin\u2019 good. His sense of crafting anecdotes into top-tier material and knowing how to use his sweet-molasses pacing to calmly detonate a joke is damn near peerless.<\/p>\n

\n\tYou do get that Bargatze in The Breadwinner, the clueless husband and dad oblivious to the emotional labor that turns moms into do-it-all domestic goddesses. That\u2019s all you get, because this isn\u2019t a showcase for the comic\u2019s range or a potential bid to coronate him as a chameleonic actor. No one\u2019s mistaking this for My Left Foot. He\u2019d be the first to tell you that.<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s just a good old-fashioned star vehicle, co-written by Bargatze and Dan Lagana, designed to pitch him as the sort of leading man you would have cast in old-school comedies. Something like, I dunno, Mr. Mom, the 1983 hit that turned Michael Keaton into a poster boy for stay-at-home dads trying their best to figure out that darn washer and dryer! That Reagan-era nugget had undercurrents of anxiety about flipped gender roles, economic instability, and xenophobic fears of Japan beating us at our own industrial game, along with jokes about the impossible task that is grocery shopping for a family of five. Bargatze\u2019s remake-in-all-but-name offers not just an update but a counterpoint: How about we strip everything out but that last part?<\/p>\n

\n\tSeriously, you wonder if this project really started with an AI prompt asking, \u201cWhat if Mr. Mom 2026 but also Bargatze\u2019s whole act?\u201d It literally ends with a montage of bits from his specials that are essentially the exact same jokes you\u2019ve been watching for the previous 90-plus minutes, so it\u2019s not like anyone\u2019s covering their tracks. Bargatze is Nate Wilcox, the top car salesman at his Toyota dealership in Nashville and a dedicated but slightly doofus-y family man. His wife, Katie (Mandy Moore<\/a>), runs a tight ship on the homefront. Their daughters run the gamut from young teen starting to notice boys (Stella Grace Fitzgerald) to young tween with glasses who\u2019s way into spelling bees (Hadley Wilcox), and young moppet who talks a lotta screenwriter-penned sass (Charlotte Ann Tucker). You know the archetypes.<\/p>\n

\n\tKatie\u2019s designed an organizational system that someone thinks is highly marketable, which is how she ends up on Shark Tank<\/a> and, despite Nate humiliating himself on TV \u2014 why, that dad! [shakes fist] \u2014 ends up winning an investment deal. But Mom has to go to South Korea to oversee prototype manufacturing, which means the bumbling dumbass half of the parenting equation has to take care of the kids, and make the breakfasts, and take them to school, and pick them up from school, and do laundry, and we\u2019re exhausted on his behalf just typing all of these words. Nate\u2019s b\u00eate noire is not his fellow Toyota salesman (Kumail Nanjiani<\/a>), who\u2019s gunning for Nate\u2019s Number One spot and free Tennessee Titans tickets. It\u2019s not the world\u2019s clingiest fellow domesticated dad (Colin Jost<\/a>) who keeps wanting to bro down with him. It\u2019s not even a creeping sense of failure at being a father, or the notion that no longer being the primary breadwinner has a neutering effect in our era of manosphere blathering. It\u2019s towels. So, so many dirty towels.<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tBargatze vs. food in The Breadwinner.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tFrank Masi\/Sony Pictures<\/p>\n

\n\tBargatze is an expert at making this kind of suburban Middle American character both lovable and laughable, and his stated goal was always to make the sort of inoffensive comedy that makes for solid family-movie-night programming. He definitely nailed the inoffensive part. Even when The Breadwinner starts to tiptoe toward potential reactionary ideas about who belongs in the workplace and who belongs at home, the movie backs off and makes sure that no leaves the theater riled up. Every so often, he\u2019ll put a particular spin on a punchline masquerading as a line of dialogue (\u201cAll-purpose cleaner? It should be called \u2018no-purpose\u2019 cleaner\u201d) that reminds you why he\u2019s selling out tours across the country. You just have to suffer through a lot of generic, sitcom-level gags, some corny life lessons-type pathos, and a Walmart commercial to get the occasional chuckle.<\/p>\n

\n\tYeah, a Walmart commercial \u2014 there\u2019s no other way to describe it. That scene comes right around the middle of the film, after the KFC dinner but before the final Titans Jumbotron cameo, when Bargatze declares the \u201cDad Era\u201d is now in full effect in the beleaguered Wilcox household. They\u2019re gonna start doing things his way, gosh darnit, and that means going to a \u201cmagical place\u2026 that has everything!\u201d Cue the family strolling through the superstore and shopping. It\u2019s the one point in the movie where you start to experience something besides the pleasant buzz of Bargatze\u2019s innocuous, Xanax-washed-down-with-iced-tea style of comedy. You start to feel like you\u2019re a consumer being sold a bill of goods, and this is just one more product meant for you to buy, consume, and forget. The first two options are up to you. The last one couldn\u2019t be more easy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nate Bargatze is not a dumb guy. He just plays one on TV. And, of course, onstage in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":471674,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[19532,93,61,60,105591,51948,270,11911,34630,150969],"class_list":["post-471673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-colin-jost","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-kumail-nanjiani","tag-mandy-moore","tag-movies","tag-nate-bargatze","tag-shark-tank","tag-will-forte"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471673"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471673\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/471674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}