The lovely, funny \u201cAmerican Classic,\u201d premiering Sunday on MGM+, is a love letter to theater, community and community theater. Kevin Kline plays Richard Bean, a narcissistic stage actor. He\u2019s famous enough to be opening on Broadway in \u201cKing Lear,\u201d but he has to be pushed onstage and is forgetting lines. After he drunkenly assails a hostile New York Times critic \u2014 caught on video, of course \u2014 he\u2019s suspended from the play, and his agent (Tony Shalhoub) advises him to get out of town and lay low until the heat\u2019s off, as they used to say in the gangster movies.<\/p>\n
Learning that his mother (Jane Alexander, acting royalty, in film clips) has died, Richard heads back to his small Pennsylvania hometown, where his family \u2014 all actors, like the Barrymores, but no longer acting \u2014 owns a once-celebrated theater. To Richard\u2019s horror, it has, for want of income, become a dinner theater, hosting touring productions of \u201cNunsense\u201d<\/a> and \u201cForever Plaid\u201d<\/a> instead of the great stage works on which he cut his teeth.<\/p>\n Brother Jon (Jon Tenney), running the kitchen at the theater, is married to Kristen (Laura Linney), Richard\u2019s onetime acting partner, who dated him before her marriage; now she\u2019s the mayor. Their teenage daughter, Miranda (Nell Verlaque) \u2014 a name from Shakespeare \u2014 does want to act and move to New York, as her mother had before her, but is afraid to tell her parents. Richard\u2019s father, Linus (Len Cariou), is suffering from dementia, though not to the point he won\u2019t actively contribute to the action; every day he comes out again as gay.<\/p>\n Across the eight-episode series, things move from the ridiculous to the sublime. Richard\u2019s attempt to stage his mother\u2019s funeral, with her coffin being lowered from the ceiling, while \u201cAlso sprach Zarathustra\u201d plays and smoke billows toward the audience, fortunately comes to naught; but he announces at the ceremony that he\u2019ll direct a production of Thornton Wilder\u2019s 1938 play \u201cOur Town\u201d at the theater, to \u201crestore the soul of this town.\u201d (His big idea is to ignore Wilder\u2019s stage directions, which ask for no curtain, no set and few props, with a \u201crealistic version,\u201d featuring a working soda fountain, rain effects and a horse.) Fate will have other plans for this, and not to give away what in any case should be obvious, the title of the play will also become its ethos, with a cast of amateurs, including Miranda\u2019s jealous boyfriend, Randall (Ajay Friese), and ordinary people standing in for the ordinary people of Wilder\u2019s Grover\u2019s Corners.<\/p>\n The series has a comfortable, cushiony feeling; it\u2019s the sort of show that could have been made as a film in the 1990s, and in which Kline could have starred as easily in his 40s as in his 70s; it has the same relation to reality as \u201cDave,\u201d<\/a> in which he played a good-hearted ordinary Joe who takes the place of a lookalike U.S. president. The town is essentially a sunny place, full of mostly sunny people, to all appearances, a typical comedy hamlet. But we\u2019re told it\u2019s distressed, and Mayor Kristen is in transactional cahoots with developer Connor Boyle (Billy Carter), who wants clearance to build a casino on the site of a landmark hotel. (Much of the plot is driven by money \u2014 needing it, trading for it, leaving it, losing it.) He also wants his heavily accented, bombshell Russian girlfriend, Nadia (Elise Kibler), to have a part in \u201cOur Town.\u201d<\/p>\n