The Baxters, now streaming on Prime Video, adapts Karen Kingsbury’s popular series of faith-based novels about an extended Christian family living in Bloomington, Indiana. For the first 10-episode season, the marriage of a vaguely insufferable young woman hangs in the balance.
Opening Shot: The camera pans down from a shot of an SUV pulling into a driveway to show a mailbox labeled, yes, THE BAXTERS.
The Gist: Not to be confused with an innovative sitcom/talk-show hybrid from the late 1970s, the first season of The Baxters is potentially the opening installment of a Karen Kingsbury Cinematic Universe – a television series based on the family of characters who appear across many of her 100-plus novels. Elizabeth (Roma Downey) and John (Ted McGinley) head the Baxter family, still offering tender love and support to their five mostly-grown children: Kari (Ali Cobrin), Ashley (Masey McLain), Brooke (Emily Peterson), Erin (Reilly Anspaugh), and Luke (Josh Plasse), none of whom have seen fit to move away from their hometown.
Despite the usual awkward exposition (see below), the first episode isn’t a thorough introduction to all seven principal Baxters and their various individual families. Some of them barely appear at all. Rather than mixing together various plots, the first season will apparently serialize the story of Kari, whose seemingly put-together life is shattered by the revelation that her professor husband Tim (Brandon Hirsch) is in love with one of his students and wants a Godless, heretical divorce. (The opening credits even bill several non-family characters higher due to their prominence in Kari’s storyline.) The show appears to be setting up a love triangle of sorts between Kari, her straying husband, and her One That Got Away (But Not Too Far Away Because He Also Lives in Their Hometown), Ryan (Jake Allyn).
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Roma Downey is best-known for Touched By an Angel, though there’s nothing otherworldly about this show, which feels more like a grown-up version of family dramas like Seventh Heaven. It’s definitely got that old-time network-TV feeling, with a heavy dose of soap opera.
Our Take: It’s difficult to criticize a faith-based show or movie as an outsider without sounding condescending or mean. This is even more difficult to avoid when the show in question is as ghastly as The Baxters, the kind of Christian-themed entertainment that’s made to offer an affirming comfort-zone watch, rather than treating its religious characters with genuine dimensionality or naturalism. At least in the first episode, no one in The Baxters behaves; they all act, with the stilted transparency of a low-level school play or third-tier soap. At one point, Elizabeth, the saintly matriarch, is found sitting on her couch, staring at a framed photo of Kari that she holds in her hands. This is done to show that she is worrying about Kari; that’s how nervous the show gets when it’s not relying exclusively on bad dialogue.
That micromanagement is indicative of the whole first episode, where none of the characters have any opportunity to breathe; almost everyone on-screen is well-scrubbed and nearly every home well-appointed, giving the whole production a prosperity-gospel vibe. The structure of the season, where presumably major big-picture characters are introduced as supporting players in Kari’s story, has some novelty (cinematic-universe storytelling applied to less fantastical material), but that’s quickly smoothed over by the show’s plasticky uniformity. It’s the kind of faith-based universe where people without a strong interest in Bible Study groups barely seem to exist. Paradoxically, this makes it difficult to see the characters’ faith outside of a default setting; watching characters earnestly pray for each other in between complimenting each other doesn’t have much dramatic juice. That said, there is some genuine suspense generated in the first episode; it’s difficult to tell whether this will be the extra-pious story of Kari sticking to her faithful guns and luring the disloyal Tim back into marriage for healing, or the semi-pious story of Kari realizing she had it right the first time with Ryan – first love, best love and all that. One thing’s for sure: Kari is pretty insufferable to be around, whether in happiness or despair.
Sex and Skin: Oh, no, not in God’s McMansion. You get the feeling that if the show could convincingly imply that Tim and his mistress Angela hadn’t actually slept together, it would.
Parting Shot: Kari runs her fingers over an old yearbook inscription from ex-flame Ryan, and smiles to herself.
Sleeper Star: Taylour Paige, known for the wild A24 Twitter-thread movie Zola, is the least stiff member of the cast, playing Angela as more thoughtful and grounded than a typical homewrecker character (even as the show attempts to taint her through her mild interest in drinking red wine with dinner).
Most Pilot-y Line: “Peter, what’s it like being married to a doctor and a first-born?” Nothing like a family get-together in a pilot for family members to describe their circumstances to each other! There’s plenty more where that came from; most of the characterization in the first episode is all tell, no show.
Our Call: If you’re secular enough to watch almost anything else, start with that – and if you’re a big fan of the Baxters, it sounds like there are literally dozens of books that offer more immediate variety than Kari’s divorce saga. SKIP IT.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.