Hitting the highway with the kids in tow can make for a magical holiday, but it makes for boring television. It is only when the fun flies south and everything goes batty with a vengeance, as in The Detour, that the real road trip hilarity pops into gear.
This new OSN First Comedy HD series about a family that comes to motorway grief hails from a super-couple – Jason Jones (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart) and Samantha Bee (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee) – and is inspired by their own experiences with family trips.
There's a good reason the road movie has long been a Hollywood staple – from National Lampoon's Vacation (1983) and Dumb and Dumber (1994) to Little Miss Sunshine (2006) and even Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) – because of the freedom it gives to introduce new characters and crises on the fly to keep a story driving hard.
In The Detour, Jones stars as the dad, Nate, who hits life's big potholes with wife Robin (Natalie Zea, The Following), and their kids Delilah (Ashley Gerasimovich) and Jared (Liam Carroll). Every click of their trip is fraught with disaster as they face one hellish turn after another. If there's trouble on the road, this family will find it.
What lifts The Detour a notch above the usual is the fact that the kids on this show are more than precocious decorations.
“I think it’s a true four-hander, in my opinion,” says Jones. “Kids are appendages on so many family sitcoms. They’ll come in, they’ll make half a joke, and then they’re like, ‘OK, gotta go to school’ or ‘I’m going to my room’. And then you never see them again.
“We found two terrific kid actors, obviously, but trusting these kids to pull off jokes was the big thing, or to land moments of truth. I think that they both did it exceptionally, exceptionally well.”
“Once people start to watch it, they’ll go, ‘Oh, this is familiar, but it’s completely different at the same time’,” says Jones. “Then, especially where we’re going with the show, it’s a radically different change. A detour, if you will, from the expected.”
• The Detour airs at 11.30pm on Friday on OSN First Comedy HD. For details, visit www.osn.com
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