Reba and Melissa Peterman, reunited again at Happy’s Place | Casey Durkin/NBC
The new show doesn’t break any molds, but it sure is cozy
In 2001, country star Reba McEntire ruled the airwaves with her eponymous sitcom, Reba. In the series, McEntire stars as a single mom who — well, you know how the song goes. The show only ran for six seasons but developed a cult following in syndication, and it continues to inspire memes. When Reba was added to Netflix earlier this year, it stayed in the top 10 for weeks. And now, McEntire and Melissa Peterman, who starred in Reba as the bubbly Barbra Jean, will try to recreate that magic in the new NBC sitcom Happy’s Place, premiering October 18.
In Happy’s Place, McEntire plays Bobbie, a Tennessee woman who inherits a neighborhood bar from her late father, Happy. Just as she gets it up and running, she’s confronted with Happy’s biggest secret: He cheated on Bobbie’s mother and had a daughter with another woman. After his death, he left the bar to both Bobbie and her half-sister Isabella (Belissa Escobedo), a 20-something who’s essentially a walking Gen Z stereotype. Peterman plays Gabby, a bartender at Happy’s Place, and like her forebear Barbra Jean, she’s desperate to be Bobbie’s best friend.
Predictably, Bobbie and Isabella have different ideas about how to run Happy’s Place, and thus the series’s central conflict. Bobbie’s more old-school, Isabella’s trying to shake up the joint with her newfangled ideas. In one scene, Bobbie’s happy for a bartender to fix a broken air conditioner for free, while Isabella fiercely argues that he should be compensated for that labor, even though the bar is barely breaking even. However you feel about playing the Boomer-Gen Z divide for laughs, it tends to work here, even if the jokes are mostly of the the type that comprise your uncle’s “kids these days” rants at the Thanksgiving dinner table.
The titular bar in Happy’s Place is primarily a backdrop for these complicated family dynamics, in the same way that MacLaren’s Pub was the setting for the love story in How I Met Your Mother. It’s not really a show about the inner workings of a neighborhood bar, but the bar does offer plenty of opportunities for comedic relief, buoyed by the ensemble cast. There’s the neurotic accountant Steve (Pablo Castelblanco), who balances the bar’s books; McEntire’s real-life boyfriend Rex Linn appears as Emmett, the crotchety, largely silent chef at Happy’s Place who fries up chicken wings and chops veggies while he offers Bobbie morsels of advice to navigate her new reality. Altogether, the cast and its characters sort of resemble a redneck Cheers, punctuated with plenty of southern twang.
The actual story aside, it’s clear that this series is a spiritual continuation of the Reba universe, if not literally. The interplay between Peterman and McEntire is as slapstick as ever, and Bobbie is just like Reba — a tough, sassy gal who’s always convinced that she’s right. In Reba, McEntire’s character was not all that different from Bobbie — a woman figuring out how to play the cards she’s been dealt. Where Reba nurtured her children and her rocky relationship with her ex-husband, Bobbie is working to find a way to keep her father’s legacy alive and come to terms with the fact that she has a sister she never knew about.
For anyone who loved Reba, this dynamic is immediately familiar — and comforting. As we near a hotly contested presidential election that may determine the future of our democracy, this is the kind of cozy, goofy television I want to watch. It might be a little cheesy, but sometimes that’s exactly what you need.
