Jon Cryer was already a big name in TV comedy before he arrived on NBC in the 2024 TV schedule as the star of Extended Family, thanks to twelve seasons of Two and a Half Men opposite Charlie Sheen. Extended Family was a return to a multi-cam sitcom for the actor, and he spoke with CinemaBlend about coming back to a live studio audience... and how he almost joined a different NBC sitcom even before Two and a Half Men.
The Extended Family star as well as creator Mike O'Malley spoke with CinemaBlend on the red carpet of SCAD TVfest in Atlanta. Given that Cryer has worked on shows ranging from NCIS to Supergirl (as legendary villain Lex Luthor) in recent years, I asked the actor what it was like for him to return to a live studio audience for the first time since Two and a Half Men ended in 2015. He shared:
Oh, it's great. We were the first show back with a post-COVID audience. So they were all masked for the first couple of shows, and they were a little farther away, which is a little disconcerting. [laughs] They're muffled and farther away. So like, 'For some reason, it doesn't feel like the jokes are going over the way I had hoped!' But there's nothing better than being in front of a crowd. You're just not doing it in a vacuum. It amps up your energy and you can really assess how people are perceiving the character, which is great. And there's that baseline comfort. I love this medium.
Few people have as much sitcom experience as Jon Cryer, and he only had good things to say about returning to the live studio audience format for Extended Family. The new show also stars Donald Faison, who came with plenty of sitcom experience himself thanks to Scrubs, as well as Grey's Anatomy alum Abigail Spencer.
For Extended Family, Cryer and Spencer star as Jim and Julia Kearney, who are raising their kids in the wake of an amicable divorce. Trey Taylor (Faison) is in the mix as Julia's new fiancé, who also happens to be the owner of the Boston Celtics.
The sitcom marks Cryer's sitcom arrival on NBC after more than a decade of comedy on CBS, and it turns out that there's more to the story than simple chance that he hadn't appeared on the network before. He explained:
I'd never been on a show for NBC really before. NBC for a while wanted nothing to do with me. There was apparently a memo. 'We want nothing to do with Jon Cryer.' No, seriously! They wanted me for a recurring, like a three-episode arc, on Caroline in the City, if you recall. And the network said, 'Oh, no, no, no, no!' And you wonder what on earth did I do to the network people. Who knows? It's all water under the bridge.
Apparently, NBC was not looking to hire Jon Cryer for any kind of job back in the day! Caroline in the City was a multi-cam sitcom starring Lea Thompson, and it ran for four seasons and nearly 100 episodes from 1995-1999. Given that Two and a Half Men didn't launch until 2003, could the course of his career have veered in a different direction if he'd been cast on Caroline in the City, even if just for a few episodes?
We'll never know, but as the actor said, it's "all water under the bridge now," and he's the leading man of an NBC sitcom. It's a funny piece of trivia, however, and I had to pitch Jon Cryer and Mike O'Malley on the idea of an arc about Jim irrationally hating Caroline in the City. The Extended Family duo laughed and responded:
- Jon Cryer: "Jim just has this weird thing! It’s like every time and really random."
- Mike O'Malley: "We should be so lucky that we go as long as Caroline in the City."
While the four seasons of Caroline in the City aren't nearly as long as Cryer's Two and a Half Men with twelve seasons or even Mike O'Malley's Yes, Dear with six seasons, TV is a competitive business, and Extended Family isn't even guaranteed a second season at this point. It's not hard to see O'Malley's point about running as long as Caroline in the City!
You can do your part to support Extended Family by watching new episodes on Tuesdays at 8:30 p.m. ET on NBC, and earlier episodes streaming with a Peacock Premium subscription. If you're also now in the mood to revisit Two and a Half Men, you can find that series streaming on Peacock as well.
